Last week, this column took to task the continuing decline of dress in public, or rather, the rise of the undressed. That column talked about the need, a desperate one in my mind, for full-length mirrors. Of all the things government could give us, placing a full-length mirror in every home, as opposed to a chicken in every pot, might well be the first antibiotic against the tendency of folks to dress down, way, way, way down.
But the piece did get me thinking about the overall decline of manners in general. In 1992-1993, late Democrat Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan brought this matter to the fore with his magisterial “Defining Deviancy Down.” The piece appeared in The American Scholar, a once highly respected journal when it was led by the irrepressible Joseph Epstein, who likely lost his post owing to political pressure. Today, its topics are charged with leftwing bias, DEI-esque nonsense, and the usual claptrap that marks nearly all of our institutions of higher education. I doubt Moynihan, even with his ranking as a premier public intellectual in the nineties, could get a hearing today.
What Moynihan brought to the fore was what everyone knew but was afraid to say out loud. Moynihan stressed how society had begun to soft-pedal bad behavior. Moynihan argued that rising crime, broken homes, one-parent families, and out-of-wedlock children had begun to be considered “normal,” and by normalizing these behaviors, we were sure to get more of them. And so, we did. The view then and certainly now is that no one is at fault, no one makes mistakes, no one is to blame. We are all victims of circumstances beyond our control and cannot possibly be held responsible for anything we do.
If you think I hyperbolize, just try talking about normal behavior with anyone, and you’ll likely get a vicious, “What do you mean normal!? What does normal mean anyway!?” Normal has become a white-privileged word, or a fifties mindset. Normal is nothing now. All behavior is your so-called normal.
Sadly, we see this view present everywhere. People think nothing about using profanity freely and without restraint. You have something to say, you’d better say it with the f-bomb, and not just one f-bomb but a dozen. Soi-disant Internet influencers, especially those who hate the current administration, cannot string together two sentences without using the f-bomb like a period. The result would be laughable in meaning if it were not so lamentable in fact. Recently, an NFL coach was interviewed about his team’s loss, and according to reports, he used the f-bomb nearly a dozen times in three sentences.
Then there is the blatant use of sex in everything. We have all seen it in movies, and the sex is worse than gratuitous. The storyline moves along and suddenly everyone is in bed or in the back seat or on the beach, or—you get the idea—and grunting, sweating, and screaming ensues. Casual sex has become even less than casual. It’s just something one must do, like breathing.
When movies aren’t shoving sex in our faces—forgive the image—books are. And I don’t mean the usual chest-heaving, swooning, breathless romance novels. Sex is ubiquitous, not only in young adult novels, but also in books for children. Yes, children. No child ever asks for this. Adults have led them to this flotsam and jetsam of human behavior. The end result has not been helpful. These books appear as how-to recruitment tools for the mean-spirited among us. If you are not reading what your children are reading, you need to begin tonight. Gone are the novels that carry you away to make-believe worlds. Numerous are the books that, even if fantasy or sci-fi, are replete with depictions of various forms of sexual intercourse.
The great English essayist, G. K. Chesterton, once wrote that, “When people cease to believe in God, they do not then believe in nothing: they believe in anything.”
The trouble with truisms is that they are invariably true. We now cannot define what a woman is, we believe that men can have babies, and that they should be allowed in women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, and, of course, their sports. We believe that God is passe and that crystals or Quija boards, or whatever, are right-minded beliefs. We now believe that every adolescent is going through some gender dysphoria, and that every child is suicidal (and given what they are taught, who can blame them?). We cannot say Merry Christmas because that’s offensive, and malls play every ditty but nothing sacred. We believe every company must hire according to race, and every white person is racist. We also now think it’s okay to shoot people with whom we disagree. I could go on but won’t.
Is this the society we wish to leave behind? I certainly hope not. Yes, there are those places where good people are trying to make a difference, but they are being met with fierce and excoriating resistance. Even writing about these things can get you cancelled.
This Christmas, take some time to pause and reflect. This is the season that Heaven came down, and Glory filled our souls, or so I’ve heard.
