I have long been of the opinion that preachers should avoid allusions to the painting “The Light of the World” by William Holman Hunt. This is not because it is inferior in any way. It is a tour de force of an artist’s craft and a prime example of the Pre-Raphaelite school that he began around 1848 with John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, trying to revive the mystical aura they thought had become somewhat lost in the cold rationalism of the Renaissance. They were a lively and amusing coterie.
Father Neville of the Oratory was offended when Millais smoked a pipe in the presence of John Henry Newman as he painted his great portrait of the saint. But His Eminence did not mind at all and was eminently amused.
My hesitation about Hunt’s painting of Christ knocking on a door is that it has become a cliché. It has been copied countless times, and like Leonardo’s Last Supper, it is seen so much that it is robbed of its force and even suffers the degradation of reproduction on coffee mugs and tea towels. Hunt’s painting has further been badly caricatured, as in the modern version by Warner Sallman, in a descent from cliché to kitsch.
But clichés become clichés because of their innate truth, even if they are responsible for dreary platitudes from the pulpit. Hence, the Advent days make reference to Hunt’s painting unavoidable, for its symbolism puts on the painter’s canvas, with color and linseed oil, what the scribe’s ink wrote on parchment: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and dine with him, and he with me” (Revelation 3:20).
At the risk of being tiresome, it needs to be pointed out that there is no exterior handle on the door, for it is the door of the human soul, which has to be opened from the inside. The door is covered with the thistles of sin. This is the moment when free will decides to open or shut. Free imagination assumes that the light Christ carries is seeping through cracks in the door’s rough wood, just as prophetic voices in Advent hint at a great Light about to shine on the world.
Over three centuries before the Incarnation, the Cynic philosopher Diogenes supposedly carried a lamp through the streets, “looking for an honest man.” Since Christ is Wisdom itself, the lamp he carries in portraiture is not a searchlight. It is a reflection of the light of divinity that surrounds his divine head, for he is “the radiance of God’s glory” (Hebrews 1:3). On Christmas, the Church chants the words first uttered at Nicaea in Turkey by bishops who in many instances had been battered by darkened intellects: “Light from Light.” That is not a cliché.
Saint Paul brandishes the sword of the word of God, clothed in the attire of a Jew of the First Century.
The blessed and glorious Apostle Saint Paul wrote to the Church of Philippi, these inspired and eternally valid words, nearly two thousand years ago:
Citizenship in Heaven
17 Be ye followers of me, brethren: and observe them who walk so as you have our model. 18For many walk, of whom I have told you often (and now tell you weeping) that they are enemies of the cross of Christ:19Whose end is destruction: whose God is their belly: and whose glory is in their shame: who mind earthly things. 20 But our conversation is in heaven: from whence also we look for the Saviour, our Lord Jesus Christ, 21Who will reform the body of our lowness, made like to the body of his glory, according to the operation whereby also he is able to subdue all things unto himself.
(Douay Rheims Translation)
The Apostle, who as such, enjoyed the personal charism of infallibility, was modest in his speech. Many have interpreted this passage as referring to gluttony but it refers principally to lust, and that of men.
Some men, losing all sense of reason or faith (if they ever had it), however, are so stupid and foolish and so ignorant of their own corporal endowments, that they hold that as soon as blood enters some part of their body, that they are inspired. For fools of this kind, the contemporary mass-media lie of gender theory is for them a divine revelation, directly from their god.
To that end they want all things to bend to this new revelation from below: laws, religion, and above all morals.
This is what is behind the outrageous modernism and sacrilege of scripture which was recently published by the Pontifical Biblical Commission, entitled, “Che cosa è l’uomo? Un itinerario di antropologia biblica,” (“What is man? A journey into biblical anthropology”), which in its Fourth Chapter concludes thus (source):
L’esame esegetico condotto sui testi dell’Antico e del Nuovo Testamento ha fatto apparire elementi che vanno considerati per una valutazione dell’omosessualità, nei suoi risvolti etici. Certe formulazioni degli autori biblici, come le direttive disciplinari del Levitico, richiedono un’intelligente interpretazione che salvaguardi i valori che il testo sacro intende promuovere evitando, dunque, di ripetere alla lettera ciò che porta con sé anche tratti culturali di quel tempo. Sarà richiesta un’attenzione pastorale, in particolare nei confronti delle singole persone, per attuare quel servizio di bene che la Chiesa ha da assumere nella sua missione per gli uomini
From Rome translation:
The exegetical study conducted on the texts of the Old and New Testament has made evident elements which are to be considered for an evaluation of homosexuality, in its ethical implications. Certain formulations of the biblical authors, like the disciplinary directives of Leviticus, require an intelligent interpretation to safeguard the values which the sacred text intends to promote by avoiding, therefore, to repeat according to the letter, what it also carries along with it as the cultural traits (i.e. baggage)* of that age. Pastoral attention will be required, in particular in respect of individual persons, to activate that service of the good which the Church has to assume in Her mission for men.
Admittedly this is complex double speak. So I will translate it into common English:
In other words, WE ARE INSTRUCTING YOU TO WHITEWASH GOD’S WORD AND HIDE THE SAVING TRUTH OF THE IMMORALITY OF SODOMY FROM those addicted to this sin, lest they repent and no longer serve as agents of the Globalist Marxist revolution for the destruction of all humanity. With Papa Francis’s Blessing. Wink. Wink. Hint. Hint.
That admittedly that is not a literal translation, but rather one in the style of Vatican II, that is of dynamic equivalence! (satirical comment)
Oh, and to those who say, “But this isn’t magisterial!”: “We say: well we agree, since Bergoglio was never the pope, but you really need to get a new line, because people can see through that kind of gaslighting.”
As a matter of fact, Bergoglio has announced that from now on, all Dicasteries of the Roman Curia are equal (see report here). That means, whatever the Pontifical Biblical Commission puts out, is just as authoritative as the Congregation for Divine Worship. — So get set for the next Liturgical Aggiornamento, folks!, on the lines of dumping the “cultural baggage” of the past.
_________
* This parenthesis and its content are a translator’s note, added by the From Rome Blog.
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on Some men, losing all sense of reason or faith (if they ever had it), however, are so stupid and foolish and so ignorant of their own corporal endowments, that they hold that as soon as blood enters some part of their body, that they are inspired. For fools of this kind, the contemporary mass-media lie of gender theory is for them a divine revelation, directly from their god.
According to Vatican experts who oversaw its publication, Sodom and Gomorrah were not punished for engaging in lewd acts with the same sex but were punished for closing their borders and failing to “welcome the foreigner.’ The claim is brazenly made that Scripture does not indict homosexual acts but rather indicts those who are “inhospitable” to foreigners.
Concerning the destruction of Sodom, the biblical commission asks: “But what was Sodom’s sin, that deserved such an exemplary punishment?” The authors observe that “in other passages of the Hebrew Bible which refer to Sodom’s guilt, there is no allusion to a sexual transgression practiced against people of the same sex.”
The Pontifical Biblical Commission goes on to say that the Biblical account of Sodom “is not intended to present the image of an entire city dominated by irrepressible homosexual cravings; rather, it denounces the conduct of a social and political entity that does not want to welcome the foreigner with respect, and therefore claims to humiliate him, forcing him to undergo an infamous treatment of submission.”
The authors make clear their view that the punishment of the Sodomites was “motivated by the fact that they had shown a deep hatred towards the foreigner.”
The Biblical Commission concludes:
We must therefore say that the story about the city of Sodom (as well as that of Gabaa) illustrates a sin that consists in the lack of hospitality, with hostility and violence towards the stranger, a behavior judged very serious and therefore deserving to be sanctioned with the utmost severity, because the rejection of the different, of the needy and defenseless stranger, is a principle of social disintegration, having in itself a deadly violence that deserves an adequate punishment.
So according to Francis’ “reformed” Vatican, patriots who courageously guard their borders against Communists and Jihad invaders are now “sodomite offenders” who deserve punishment while those who offend God by engaging in a terrible sin that cries to Heaven for vengeance (homosexuality) can now be acceptable persons whose lifestyle is “legitimate” and “dignified.”
Consider the following from the authors:
A new and more adequate understanding of the human person imposes a radical reservation on the exclusive value of heterosexual unions, in favor of a similar acceptance of homosexuality and homosexual unions as a legitimate and worthy expression of the human being. What is more — it is sometimes argued — the Bible says little or nothing about this type of erotic relationship, which should therefore not be condemned.”
Had the authors ever read St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans wherein he criminalizes those men who “have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error?” According to the Apostle, “They who do such things are worthy of death; and not only they that do them, but they also that consent to them that do them.” (Romans 1: 27, 32)
Hence we see how Vatican progressives are skillfully using this new book to not only normalize homosexuality in the Catholic Church but to help advance the globalist plan for a borderless one-world government.
The problem with the book is that there is nothing in the Bible that suggests that lack of hospitality had anything to do with God’s verdict against the Sodomites or that homosexuality may be hospitably welcomed by the Christian. It rather is condemned from the beginning. “Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind, because it is an abomination.” (Leviticus 18:22) It was the sin of homosexuality that brought the fierce punishment of God upon Sodom and Gomorrah, but it appears that Rome is in denial of this Biblical fact.
And why? Because Rome today is infested with gay sympathizers like Cardinal Oscar Maradiaga who heads the pope’s “Council of Nine” or Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia who heads the new Pontifical Academy for Life. Not to mention the many others that are part of this Vatican “gay lobby” that Pope Francis works closely with. Unfortunately, this latest Vatican publication is among the key “fruits” of their labors.
It was reported recently that Pope Francis had requested the Pontifical Biblical Commission to reevaluate the Biblical teaching on homosexuality, apparently in preparation for the new book. We pray that the book quickly be condemned, lest souls be sent down the path to perdition because of it.
Well, it’s done. House Democrats have voted on the article of impeachment against President Donald Trump. They’re garbage. They’re weak. This push faces certain death in the Republican Senate. And that’s why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi decided to hold onto the articles, refusing to transmit them to the Senate because Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has pretty much said this whole circus is coming down—and he’ll be the one who rips down the big top. House Democrats think that Senate Republicans should abide by what they want for the trial. That’s not their call. Elections have consequences and the GOP kept the Senate. For all their talk about abuse of power and a constitutional crisis, Pelosi decided to create one of her own because…‘orange man, bad.’ They’re taking the ‘we had to destroy the village to save it’ approach. The only way for Democrats to save the Constitution is for them to plunge Congress into a crisis. Also, if Trump is such a threat, as they’ve said, why hold onto the articles. Deep down, to take a quote from the father of fake news Dan Rather, they know this case is shakier than cafeteria Jell-O.
Now, Katie wrote up that Trump technically might not be impeached yet because House Democrats dithered around—and this comes from the lefty law professor, Noah Feldman, who Democrats asked to testify in support of their witch-hunt. He wrote the following in Bloomberg:
According to the Constitution, impeachment is a process, not a vote
If the House does not communicate its impeachment to the Senate, it hasn’t actually impeached the president. If the articles are not transmitted, Trump could legitimately say that he wasn’t truly impeached at all.”
The Constitution doesn’t say how fast the articles must go to the Senate. Some modest delay is not inconsistent with the Constitution, or how both chambers usually work.
But an indefinite delay would pose a serious problem. Impeachment as contemplated by the Constitution does not consist merely of the vote by the House, but of the process of sending the articles to the Senate for trial. Both parts are necessary to make an impeachment under the Constitution: The House must actually send the articles and send managers to the Senate to prosecute the impeachment. And the Senate must actually hold a trial.
Yeah, awkward. Now, we have liberal law professor Alan Dershowitz writing about how a recent Supreme Court just “ripped the rug” from under part of the Democrats’ impeachment nonsense concerning subpoenas:
The decision by the Supreme Court to review the lower court rulings involving congressional and prosecution subpoenas directed toward President Trump undercuts the second article of impeachment that passed the House Judiciary Committee along party lines…
That second article of impeachment charges President Trump with obstruction of Congress for refusing to comply with the congressional subpoenas in the absence of a final court order. In so charging him, the House Judiciary Committee has arrogated to itself the power to decide the validity of subpoenas, and the power to determine whether claims of executive privilege must be recognized, both authorities that properly belong with the judicial branch of our government, not the legislative branch. The House of Representatives will do likewise, when it votes to approve the articles, as the chamber is expected to do so Wednesday.
President Trump has asserted that the executive branch, of which he is the head, need not comply with congressional subpoenas requiring the production of privileged executive material, unless there is a final court order compelling such production. He has argued, appropriately, that the judicial branch is the ultimate arbiter of conflicts between the legislative and executive branches. Therefore, the Supreme Court decision to review these three cases, in which lower courts ruled against President Trump, provides support for his constitutional arguments in the investigation.
[…]
Even if the high court were eventually to rule against the claims by President Trump, the fact that the justices decided to hear them, in effect, supports his constitutional contention that he had the right to challenge congressional subpoenas in court, or to demand that those issuing the subpoenas seek to enforce them through court.
It undercuts the contention by House Democrats that President Trump committed an impeachable offense by insisting on a court order before sending possibly privileged material to Congress.
[…]
The first article goes too far in authorizing impeachment based on the vague criterion of abuse of power. But it is the second article that truly endangers our system of checks and balances and the important role of the courts as the umpires between the legislative and executive branches under the Constitution.
Dershowitz pretty much said that dropping this article would be logical, and he’s made the case how both articles fail to meet constitutional standards. Toward the end, with this decision by the Court, he wrote, “the entire process smacks of partisanship, with little concern for the precedential impact which these articles could have on future impeachments.” Yes, and another observation that Democrats don’t care about the rule of law or institutional integrity. They just hate Trump, which is why they didn’t drop this article, making their whole case even weaker than it already was when this fiasco began.
Pope Francis greets the crowd during his general audience in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican May 1, 2019. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)
Bemused? Befuddled? Puzzled? What word do I use to describe my reaction to the recent media consensus that the U. S. bishops on their ad liminia visits to Rome will (and indeed must) fall all over themselves to “reassure” Pope Francis that they in no way stand in opposition to him? I am puzzledbecause I am wondering where this hard-and-fast rule was when John Paul II was pope.
I came into the Church as an adult convert after John Paul II became pope. One of the first things I noticed as a new Catholic was how much dissent there was in a Church that, from the outside (as the “spiritual-but-not-religious” Moralistic Therapeutic Deist I was) seemed such an impressively unified body of beliefs and believers. In my first years of graduate study in theology, I found deep divisions over how to read the Bible, interpreting the documents of the Second Vatican Council, the nature and binding character of traditional magisterial teaching, the role and authority of the Pope, the provisions of Catholic moral teaching, and much else.
John Paul II was insistently proclaiming that a new spirit should blow through the Church, one in continuity with the great traditions of the past, and it was in accord with them that the Second Vatican Council should be interpreted. But he was also employing in exciting new ways the resources of contemporary philosophy, especially phenomenology, to help clarify classical theological formulations. No one who knew anything about history could say this was a papacy “stuck in the Dark Ages.” It was new, yet steeped in the old, and exciting.
But there was dissent everywhere. I had a professor who announced one day before class: “I had to pull my daughter out of the Ursuline Academy. They are bad mouthing the pope every day. I am putting my daughter into public school. They won’t bad mouth the pope there. They wouldn’t dare.” And they didn’t. But the Ursuline sisters did. In fact, a lot of Catholic clerics and religious did. Pretty much all the time.
I thought, “Wow, this Church really means it when they talk about allowing dissent.” As a newly minted Catholic, I was surprised not only by the constant drumbeat of dissent, but also by its self-righteous stridency. I soon grew accustomed to it. But it continued to seem strange to me that, although my friends and I had gotten opposition for our “Catholic” views at the secular humanist institution I had attended as an undergraduate, I found the opposition much worse at Catholic institutions. It was rare to go more than ten minutes in a class without hearing, “Peter was never in Rome.” Or “the empty tomb was not really empty.” Or “the Exodus event never happened.”
It was a time when Hans Küng had become wealthy (a Catholic priest-professor informed me with no little satisfaction) giving lectures on Catholic campuses around the world after the publication of his book questioning papal infallibility. Charles Curran was a celebrity for dissenting from the Church’s moral teaching on contraception and Richard McBrien was the face of Catholicism on television. It was well known that you couldn’t get a decent teaching post in theology at a major Catholic university if you weren’t a Catholic dissenter.
“Papolatry” was the Jesuit’s phrase during those years for those who took the Pope too seriously. It was taken to be a serious threat to the Church; indeed, for some, it was the most serious threat to the Church.
In their 2003 book Passionate Uncertainty: Inside the American Jesuits, Peter McDonough and Eugene Bianchi recounted the comment of a then-fifty eight year old Jesuit sociologist who bragged that: “The Society has not sold its soul to the ‘Restoration’ of John Paul II.” Another Jesuit, a church historian, complained: “[He’s] probably the worst pope of all times,” then corrected himself: “He’s not one of the worst popes; he’s the worst. Don’t misquote me.” They didn’t.
“There’s a cutting off of dialogue,” this Jesuit continued, “a listening to one side, at least that’s the impression he gives. Control, not listening.” A constant theme of that book was the irritation these men felt at what they saw as a failure of “subsidiarity” in the institutional Church.
Things were in such a state across the Society that the redoubtable Fr. Paul Mankowski, S.J., would, upon the death of John Paul II, write: “Over the course of 28 years in the Society of Jesus, I’ve watched Wojtyla-hatred turn into one of the principal sub-themes of Jesuit life.” Mankowski told the story of fellow Jesuit Fr. Cyril Barrett saying of the failed assassin Mehmet Ali Agca, “in a bellow that filled a London restaurant”: “The only thing wrong with that bloody Turk was that he couldn’t shoot straight!”
“The reason for these Jesuits’ Wojtyla-hatred,” wrote Mankowski, “is no mystery. His fiercest adversaries have always been liberal-apostate Catholics: those who, in flat contradiction to the logic of doctrine, press for that doctrine to change. Women may become priests, and approval may be given to contraception, but the institution that enacts these innovations ipso facto has ceased to be part of the Catholic Church.” And, he adds:
The dreams that progressivists surfaced during Paul VI’s pontificate — of a congregational, sexually emancipated, anti-sacral ‘picnic’ catholicism — were frankly infantile. Yet Catholics over 50 will remember the emotional mist of auto-suggestion that ‘the next pope’ would move with the times and make these dreams come true. Not all Jesuits got smitten by this vision, but the majority did, and was stunned when Wojtyla failed to act out its fantasy. Many left the Society to seethe outside it; others remained, and seethe within.
It seems the seething is over. The Jesuits now have their pope.
But given the previous generation’s insistence on the overriding importance of “subsidiarity” within the Church and the value they placed on “dissent,” why, if it isn’t too indelicate to ask, are the American bishops, each of whom has his own apostolic authority, now being expected to trundle off submissively to Rome to assure the Pope and his minions that they are absolutely not dissentingin the least from the current pontiff? The narrative has certainly changed: from Charles Curran’s “dissent” as an expression of “creative fidelity” to Austen Ivereigh’s screed against those who have “wounded” the “shepherd,” Francis, the “Great Reformer.” It is almost enough to make one think there is a bit of double-standard going on here; that many of those who demand papal obedience now were the fiercest critics of “papolatry” in the past when John Paul II was pope. Is this a principled position or simply a two-faced expression of ideology — the sort of ideology the great Czech dissident Vaclav Havel perceptively described as “a specious way of relating to the world”?
There is an old saying: “What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.” Not any more, it seems. This is a problem infecting not only the Catholic Church. One finds it throughout contemporary politics and culture. When certain more “conservative” parties are in charge, their authority is repeatedly brought into question. “Resistance” and “dissent” are taken to be high virtues and important priorities, enough to trump other concerns for traditional order and peaceful coexistence. When such “conservatives” are replaced by more “progressive” forces, this becomes the cause for tremendous celebration, as though the “will of the people” has finally triumphed and the tyrants brought low.
But then when a more “progressive” party takes power, principled dissent is taken to be a betrayal of the general will and a violation of the common good. The very thought that such “progressives” might be asked to surrender control to a more “conservative” party forces tremendous soul-searching and often requires a painful act of will. Indeed, there is often a certain kind of dangerous “illegitimacy” attributed to “counter-revolutionary” forces that does not apply to noble intentions of the progressives. Progressives hold onto power, it seems, by a certain “right” — the right not to be opposed by those who don’t really understand the needs of the people and simply aren’t as caring.
A serious dialogue about the needs of the people and the requirements of the common good would certainly be worth having. But a true dialogue would depend upon both parties agreeing not to use emotivism to obliterate “any genuine distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations.” In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre describes the difference between the two as the difference between relationships “in which each person treats the other primarily as a means to his or her ends and one in which each treats the other as an end.”
“To treat someone else as an end,” says MacIntyre,
is to offer them what I take to be good reasons for acting in one way rather than another, but to leave it to them to evaluate those reasons. It is to be unwilling to influence another except by reasons which that other he or she judges to be good. It is to appeal to impersonal criteria of the validity of which each rational agent must be his or her own judge. By contrast, to treat someone else as a means is to seek to make him or her an instrument of my purposes by adducing whatever influences or considerations will in fact be effective on this or that occasion.
“Dialogue” is not a competition to see who can manipulate the audience’s emotions more effectively. It must be a non-manipulative process wherein each party is unwilling to influence the other except by reasons which that other he or she judges to be good. What, then, can we say about tendency among many progressives to refuse even to consider or respond to the arguments of their opponents? What about Pope Francis’s repeated refusal to reply to his critics other than by questioning their good faith?
John Paul II was a dynamic figure and exuded a powerful public personality. I never much cared for the “cult of personality” that surrounded the pope, but my concerns were tempered by the fact that both he and Benedict XVI followed a long tradition in the Church of addressing the concerns of contemporary men and women with principled arguments and reasoned exhortations, producing solid teaching documents that bore continual fruit upon repeated readings.
Francis, however, seems devoted to vilifying those who question him and gathering together “committees” by means of which he can manufacture a certain kind of “consensus” to support what everyone knew he wanted to do when the committee was convened. In this, he resembles nothing so much as the kind of academic bureaucrat that faculty members in colleges and universities everywhere are increasingly forced to endure, under whose enlightened despotism true “collegiality” has been replaced by corporatism and faux “consensus building,” and where “progressivism” is not only “empowered” but privileged. These are places where Havel’s greengrocer would feel as though he had never left home and where the watchwords are “Don’t make trouble. … Don’t be trouble.”
“Progressive” forces dominate the Roman curia now. They seem to think that they are instruments of the ineluctable forces of historical progress. I prefer to take the long view. Changes in the partisan parties that control human institutions are like shifting winds. Such changes are to be expected and can be, often enough, beneficial in a fallen world where all parties need continually to question their most basic principles and fundamental convictions, always remaining open to correction from others who disagree.
But respect is due only to those who agree to eschew the stratagems of emotivism and engage in non-manipulative dialogue. It is far too easy for fallen humans such as we are to get trapped in our own historical meta-narratives: “them” vs. “us”; the forces of historical “progress” against the forces of repressive traditionalism.” Indulging such fantasies blinds us to the corrective dialogues we need to be having with those with whom we disagree. For Christians, there is only one defining meta-narrative; they is only one that does not end up empowering some at the expense of others. That is the narrative of Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension to the right hand of the Father, and His continuing presence in the Church guided by His Spirit. Letting some other narrative obscure this one can only lead to dire consequences for Christians and for the ultimate good they hope to offer the world.
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About Dr. Randall B. Smith 28 ArticlesDr. Randall B. Smith is Professor of Theology and current holder of the Scanlan Foundation Chair in Theology at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. He was also the 2011-2012 Myser Fellow at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture.
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on For Christians, there is only one defining meta-narrative; there is only one that does not end up empowering some at the expense of others. That is the narrative of Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension to the right hand of the Father, and His continuing presence in the Church guided by His Spirit. Letting some other narrative obscure this one can only lead to dire consequences for Christians and for the ultimate good they hope to offer the world.
Once we recognize the insufficiency of liberal political theory, we should turn back to classical political philosophy, which offers us a deeper understanding of the American tradition and invaluable guidance in reforming our contemporary politics.
In my Public Discourseessay yesterday, I expanded on some criticisms of liberal political theory that I had originally offered in an article in National Affairs. As an alternative to liberal theory, my original article had proposed a return to statesmanship. I said that we do not need to replace liberal theory with any other ideology, or any other “theory” as the term generally gets used today.
In a broader sense, of course, no one can avoid having some “theory” of politics. Thoughtful statesmanship cannot help but rely on some intellectual framework, some set of opinions about the nature and purpose of politics. Our love of our country will always be colored by our views on political philosophy.
Many Americans today on both the right and the left have received their intellectual framework for politics from liberal theory in one form or another. Even when liberal theory cannot do justice to their own moral and political opinions, they still tend to interpret those opinions through the lens of liberal theory. So if we reject liberal theory, as I argue we ought to, then what should take its place?
Classical Political Philosophy
If one is looking for sound, statesmanly maxims, based on general observations about the nature of politics, it would be awfully hard to improve on Burke and Tocqueville. But the practical bent of those men’s thought is both their strength and their weakness. At least in their published writings, one does not find the same concern to fit politics into the larger scheme of human life and of the cosmos that one finds in the greatest Western political philosophers: Plato and Aristotle, More and Machiavelli, Locke and Rousseau, Hegel and Marx.
This is why my original article pointed back to the classical educators of statesmen, the most important of whom are Plato and his fellow heirs of Socratic political philosophy: Xenophon, Aristotle, Cicero, Plutarch. I am persuaded by Cicero’s assertion that Plato and all his disciples disagree less about politics than might appear at first glance. I would add that, once one allows for different historical conditions, there may be little daylight between the aristocratic liberalism of Burke and Tocqueville and the classical republicanism of Aristotle and Cicero. In any case, classical political philosophy offers us the robust intellectual framework we need for understanding liberal practice without help from liberal theory.
There are many good reasons to study liberal theorists, but we also have every reason to put the burden of proof on them. A thinker who starts by ignoring essential aspects of our humanity, and then rigorously deduces rules for politics that to this day have never been tested in practice, will be prima facie questionable as a guide to political practice. The Socratic framework for politics, by contrast, is vulnerable to none of the criticisms of liberal theory that I summarized in yesterday’s essay. Classical political philosophy offers us solid, practical guidance that fits well into the American political tradition at its best, from George Washington to today’s most interesting policy thinkers.
Classical Political Philosophy in Practice
Of the inadequate fraction of Socratic political thought that has survived the malignity of time, Aristotle’s Politics is the single document that comes closest to offering what we could call a general “theory of politics.” Here then are a few examples from Aristotle of how classical political philosophy could inform our study of American politics.
Aristotle tells us that in every political regime, we see a class of people who dominate the other classes through a combination of custom and force. The ruling class always seeks to justify this dominion, and it always gives reasons that are only partially valid (at best). No regime is then fully just. But a regime is better when the members of its ruling class are better human beings, and it is worse when they are worse human beings.
Thanks to its doctrine of popular sovereignty, liberal theory denies that such class conflict will have any political traction in a properly constructed government. But a glance at our history shows that it has always had plenty of political traction in American governments. And from Charles Murray and J.D. Vanceon the center-right to Robert Putnam and Richard Reeves on the center-left, American intellectuals today have been reviving interest in the political importance of social class. An Aristotelian approach to our politics would ask more explicitly what the characteristic virtues and vices of our ruling class are. Following the lead of Vance, William Deresiewicz, and Ross Douthat, we should be examining (and finding marginal improvements for) the institutions that give that class its moral formation.
Aristotle also tells us that, thanks to these unavoidable class dynamics, every political community contains the seeds of its own destruction. The ruled classes can never be fully persuaded that the rulers deserve their privileges (in part because the rulers never entirely do). And any attempt at greater inclusivity within the ruling class will only be even more irritating to those who remain excluded from it.
Under the rule of law, the irritation of those excluded from the ruling class can usually be contained and channeled. But since law itself inevitably reflects the power balance of the regime, the excluded may eventually get fed up and resort to extralegal violence. The result is civil strife or revolution, which the political scientist views in the same way that the doctor views cardiac arrest: unavoidable sooner or later, but worth putting off for as long as we possibly can.
Confident that it can secure more justice on earth than Aristotle had thought possible, liberal theory believes it has also solved the problem of regime stability. It assumes that a legitimate liberal regime will last indefinitely, at least if that regime is competently managed. Perhaps we could evaluate this assumption if we had ever seen a regime that satisfied liberal theory, much less one that was competently managed. In the meantime, countless articles and books since 2016 show that American intellectuals are finally beginning to recover an awareness—which earlier generations could hardly avoid—that our liberal constitutional structures do not enjoy some unique immortality among political institutions.
Within the soil of American culture, the seeds of civil strife lie dormant, buried but not sterilized. An Aristotelian approach to our politics would do everything in its power to keep them that way. This requires defending the rule of law at virtually all costs. It also requires moderating the dominance of the current ruling class without trying to replace it with a different ruling class. Although Aristotle admits that this latter course of moderation would be the opposite of what actual political parties are usually pushing for, he insists that it is occasionally achievable in practice and is always worth the effort.
Finally, Aristotle tells us that every regime fosters in all its citizens a common way of life based on shared moral opinions—that is, a limited range of individual ways of life, practically all of which share important elements in common. Indeed, to the extent that there is a way of life common to both rulers and ruled, this is one of the major factors holding back the ever-present threat of civil strife. Our common way of life can also be called our national “culture,” a concept whose central importance to political science was memorably highlighted by Samuel Huntington. Our way of life, or culture, gets passed on from one generation to the next through private family life, as well as through educational institutions, religious rituals, civic practices, public discourse, popular works of music and drama, and law itself in its pedagogical function.
For Aristotle, the best regime would be one that inculcated, as widely as possible, the best common way of life available to human beings. It would foster its citizens’ mental health in the fullest sense of the term. (“Mental health,” a concept virtually alien to liberal theory, is arguably the single organizing principle of all classical political philosophy.) And although Aristotle would always want us to hold our own children to a higher human standard than any regime does, he is clear that, even when we try to do so, our efforts will necessarily be circumscribed by the overwhelming power that law and public opinion wield over young minds.
Having pretended that a legitimate regime must not foster any controversial moral opinions or ways of life, liberal theory is compelled to vacillate between denying that a liberal government fosters them and denying that any reasonable person could object to the ones it does foster. This silly game, a more generic version of the Law of Merited Impossibility, is tiresome and does not deserve to be taken seriously—including by liberal theory’s opponents, of whom every new generation seem to think they are the first to discover that no government is “neutral” on questions of the good life.
Instead, an Aristotelian approach to our politics would evaluate frankly how well our American governments promote a reasonable level of human flourishing and mental health (bearing in mind what a rare thing human excellence is, under any regime whatsoever). We need to examine how well our various political and cultural institutions inculcate healthy moral opinions and habits, to reform those institutions so they can better do so, and to enact public policy that encourages their recovery and growth. Aristotle would point especially to educational institutions: he thought highly of their intrinsic importance, and he would also note that American voters enjoy much more leverage over schools and universities than over churches and mass media.
Political Philosophy without Ideology
Aristotelian political thought is what I have called “nonideological.” It does not prescribe any one set of political institutions for human beings in all times and places. Aristotle teaches statesmen within the wide range of political institutions that they may find themselves in, from republics to tyrannies and everything in between, to take advantage of those institutions’ strengths and discreetly shore up their weaknesses. He obviously could not have anticipated many features of our modern world—from the scientific revolution, to the separation of religious from political authority, to women’s liberation. But the Aristotelian framework allows us to appreciate the advantages of these and many other features of modern liberal politics, to recognize the disadvantages unavoidably attached to them, and to make the best of the situation we find ourselves in.
If we must have something called a political theory, it should be derived from Aristotle or his fellow Socratics. I know of no reason to prefer any of their competitors. Nonetheless, I stand by my statement that even Aristotelian political “theory” is not what we today usually mean by a political theory. It is not a blueprint for politics concocted by intellectuals. It is simply a philosophical articulation of what every healthy citizen already senses to be true, and of principles that we all act on whether we admit it or not.
Today, classical political philosophy’s main utility is as an antidote to the liberal and other ideologies that have made it so hard to be honest with ourselves about our own thoughts and actions, both as citizens and as human beings. In that respect it is uniquely valuable, and even indispensable, for Americans who wish to understand and improve our twenty-first-century politics.
Daniel E. Burns is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of Dallas. He is currently on leave for government service.
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on Classical political philosophy’s main utility is as an antidote to the liberal and other ideologies that have made it so hard to be honest with ourselves about our own thoughts and actions, both as citizens and as human beings. In that respect it is uniquely valuable, and even indispensable, for Americans who wish to understand and improve our twenty-first-century politics.
The year of 1969 was a time of the finest and the worst, when most institutions, equipped with the polished trophies of new science, seemed to be having a mental breakdown. A man walked on the moon. But there were riots, protests, and a moral fragmentation whose detritus now controls the seminal arbiters of culture. The tone of thought at the heart of it was a composite of bewilderment, fascination, and obtuseness. I have rarely written about the days when I was formed into a particular way of ordering my thinking, with a reluctance born of an intuition that looking back might make me brittle as a pillar of salt or soft as sentiment, for nostalgia can be a lethal alchemy. The sound and scene from fifty years past do not need to come alive again, for they never faded in my recollection. It seems like yesterday that I sat in a chapel of the ambulatory of the cavernous Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York. I signed an oath of conformity to the Thirty-Nine Articles with a quill pen from a silver inkstand and then processed behind a verger with a heavy mace to the sanctuary of the largest Gothic cathedral in the world, as it proudly called itself. For on the twentieth day of December in 1969, I was ordained an Anglican priest in a ceremony grand in itself but still small in the perspective of the important events of that year, unaware that seventeen years later I would become a Catholic priest in another cathedral in the same city a short distance away.
The processional hymn was “I bind unto myself today.” While the original is attributed to the “Lorica”of Saint Patrick, the translation sung was by Mrs. Cecil Frances Alexander, wife of the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh. We had been imbued with an assurance that Patrick himself would have been an Anglican if given the opportunity, and this confidence was expressed by the bishop whose sarcophagus our procession passed: once when asked if there was salvation outside the Episcopal Church, the Right Reverend William Manning answered: “Perhaps so, but no gentleman would care to avail himself of it.”
A canon sonorously read from the great pulpit the proclamation of intent to ordain: “We, Horace Baden Donegan, Bishop of New York, Commander of the British Empire, Doctor of Divinity, et cetera, et cetera…” The hard “C” in Oxbridge pronunciation distinguished the Latin of the caesars from that of the popes. Years later, I learned that Bishop Donegan, always kind to me and never failing in graciousness, had been born in England of an Italian father named Donegani and had changed his name. When he died at 91, his obituary said that his hobbies included listening to Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and playing golf while spending summers in London at the Ritz. My first interview with him before entering seminary consisted in a conversation about the Queen Mother to whom he would later, at Clarence House, present me, and all the while a Corgi she had given him sat on my lap.
My seminary days at the General Theological Seminary in New York City were vibrant with the Oxford Movement, and life in that close was a time machine with no intrusion from the passing century. Erudite and patient tutors, often august moral paragons, taught verities older than the fashions of the day. If a creeping violence against classical reason was infesting the world outside, there was little sense of it within those walls. We took seriously the confidence of the seventeenth-century Bishop of Ely, Simon Patrick, for whom Anglicanism represented “that virtuous mediocrity which our Church observes between the meretricious gaudiness of the Church of Rome, and the squalid sluttery of Fanatick conventicles.” Or rather, as that Aristotelian golden mean was sometimes put in more strident ways, ill distinguishing ascetics from aesthetics, we were satisfied to have a privileged perch somewhere between the painted harlot on the hills of Rome and the slovenliness of the Evangelical wench in the valley.
The bell that rang the time for Evensong was also the signal for sherry before we went into chapel in our academic gowns. Fr. Louis Bouyer was of the opinion that the Daily Offices, as arranged in the Book of Common Prayer and sung to Anglican chant, provided “a means of education by worship of which no Church, Catholic or Protestant, has the equivalent today.” There is a certain wistfulness in that assessment, given that Bouyer and the Benedictine liturgist Bernard Botte, quickly and under duress cobbled together the Eucharistic Prayer II of the Novus Ordo—supposedly channeling Saint Hippolytus—at a trattoria in Trastevere. But in our high-Victorian chapel in Chelsea Square, all was redolent of John Betjeman’s reverie: of Anglo-Catholic congresses “The bells and banners—those were the waking days/When Faith was taught and fanned to a golden blaze.” And how can I forget the good men who tutored me in veneration of Scripture and holy song? They come to me now like ghosts, not ghastly as of Endor, but as good men who tethered themselves to a meandering heritage which glanced away from its flaws—and a propensity for hanging and quartering of saints—to acknowledge Christ as Lord of history and agent of virtue. There was enough space in that contented world to accommodate Anthony Trollope and P.G. Wodehouse along with the venerable divines Lancelot Andrewes and Thomas Ken.
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Has all that gone? Demographics make clear that where it once flourished there will be nothing left of Anglicanism after this remnant generation. How it happened so suddenly was a surprise only to the preoccupied. An Anglican bishop of Chinese birth who escaped the Maoist revolution told me that during an overnight stay he learned that his entire Chancery staff were clandestine Marxists. Even so, in any cultural revolution, there are bureaucrats smiling harmlessly while planning harmful New Dawns in a pantomime of Pentecost.
A valiant attempt by Pope Benedict XVI to preserve some of that ethos has taken shape in the Anglican Ordinariate, but it had a frail start. In the United States, many if not most of those involved were not reared in that tradition, nor have they been able to explain precisely what constitutes the ethos they want to preserve. For my part, I cannot think myself worthy of the gentle and selfless men and women—many formed in the better ways of an Edwardian haze—who eased the difficult rites of passage to maturity.
I am not aware that anyone from my day in the cathedral fifty years ago remains alive. Our Creator in his generosity made all things, but he neglected to give me perfect pitch as part of his bounty, as those who hear me chant at the altar readily know, but all those blessed and splendid souls I knew are providing some sort of descant—prescinding from the judgment of the holy doctors of the Church as to where they may be. The missionaries who took the Gospel to the ends of Empire, when the unsetting sun was high in the sky, wove part of the spiritual fabric I inherited, and in their name we fervently sang, in the trebles of choirboys, “From Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strands…” Having since embraced the fullness of what was preached back then, I know that the babies I first baptized had cries no different from those I pour water on now, and the bond that binds those on sick beds—both long ago and now—is a strong one.
When I published my first book, warning that the Episcopal Church was embarking on a Gnostic course which, if altering the maleness of Holy Orders, would lead to an inversion of Holy Matrimony and a nightmare of eugenics, I was charged by many who said they once had hopes for me, with extravagance of statement and even disreputable fanaticism. It is no consolation now to know that I was right.
I am made anxious by the foreboding fact that there are those who, thinking themselves Catholic, would endorse the gross moral and doctrinal mistakes that have brought about the collapse of Anglicanism which, quivering in its last throes, is only sustained by prudently invested endowments. The collapse of the old tradition was predictable, having been founded on the venality of a rapacious king, but the foundation of the True Church on the Rock of Peter, is not a guarantee that winds will not whistle through empty convents and shrines in America and Europe, just as arid winds now blow over the vacant ancient dioceses of North Africa.
Let mine be a letter of affection without reproach, from one whose roots disdain emotion, to those who were patient with me when I first took up the promise to serve God, albeit in a mix of innocence and naīveté. There was a blessing and benison in my ignorance of the many trials that would lie ahead, for had I “loved to choose and see my path,” I would have hesitated. One cannot pretend that the path to Rome was more difficult than what one frequently found once having arrived. If there are more years allowed me in the course ahead, I may write a lengthier story of my experiences, though in some quarters it might be a precipitate of agitation. Suffice it to say that Saint John Henry Newman was an agent in my conversion. Once, standing in his pulpit in the University Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, I felt something like a bolt of lightning. At the moment, I did not understand it. Now I do. Newman said that as a Protestant “I felt my religion dreary, but not my life—but as a Catholic, my life dreary, not my religion.” Lacking his depth of soul, I never knew dreariness in any quarter. But if wistfulness is a pastiche of agony, I at least have known that no human journey is without interruptions of happiness.
Only after many years did I go back to my old seminary where my modest achievements were not without laurels. I went with hesitation and only at the bidding of a classmate who was visiting. It was hard to recognize the front building, and I was told by an officious clerk to apply by a side gate. Having rung the bell, a voice on an intercom told me to return the following Monday. Stranger still was the day I went, after many years, to the huge Cathedral of Saint John the Divine to pay respects the day before his funeral to Horace William Baden Donegan of many honors, et cetera, et cetera. His coffin reposed in the “bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” I was alone save for one silent clergyman in a tweed jacket and a nun moving her lips in prayer.
There is no sadness in all this, for days are too short for the indulgence of reverie and too full of the graces Our Lord never ceases to send. I have only gratitude for the exalted moments and for those occasional depths that are nothing other than harbingers of rising again. There are lessons to be learned in everything for an alert mind, and the ardent lesson I have learned is that there is the Word that never passes away, and any words in substitution for that Word witness to the unchanging God by their own changing.
Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Fr. George W. Rutler is pastor of St. Michael’s church in New York City. He is the author of many books including Principalities and Powers: Spiritual Combat 1942-1943 (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press) and Hints of Heaven (Sophia Institute Press). His latest books are He Spoke To Us (Ignatius, 2016); The Stories of Hymns (EWTN Publishing, 2017); and Calm in Chaos (Ignatius, 2018).
“For a long time I have held my peace, I have kept still and restrained myself;now I will cry out like a woman in travail…They shall be turned back and utterly put to shame, who trust in graven images,who say to molten images, ‘You are our gods.’”— The Prophet Isaiah, 42:14 and 17==================
Viganò Looks Toward the Triumph of Mary’s Immaculate Heart — and Calls on the Faithful to Form a “Common Front” against “IlMaligno” (“The Evil One”)
The words above (at the top) are part of a longer passage from the prophet Isaiah, 42:5-17, cited by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, 78, at the outset of a new essay entitled “An Act of Accusation against Pope Francis and of Love for the Church” published this morning in Italy in Italian on the Italian website Corrispondenza Romana (link).
The Corrispondenza Romana site is directed by Italian Catholic historian Dr. Roberto de Mattei; de Mattei has been in contact with Viganò in recent weeks. The text was also published in a slightly condensed form on Italian journalist Marco Tosatti‘s website, Stilum Curiae. Also, American journalist Diane Montagna — author of an interesting book-length interview with Bishop Athanasius Schneider (link) — has published this morning an English-language summary of Viganò’s essayon the LifeSiteNews website, promising a complete English translation later today. (I plan to send out the complete text when that translation is posted…)=======================
Viganò on Francis and Mary
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò today published a brief but dramatic essay entitled “An Act of Accusation against Pope Francis and of Love for the Church” in which he sharply criticizes some of the recent statements of Pope Francis in regard to the Virgin Mary, and then condemns the “ambiguous” and “modernist” teachings of the present pontiff. (The full text in English is expected later today from LifeSiteNews.)
The essay seems clearly in part a response to remarks Pope Francis made about Mary on December 12, the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
(I note here an interesting report on the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe at the Abyssum website of retired Bishop Rene Henry Gracida of Corpus Christi, Texas, USA, who is now 96 years old: link. The information at this web site will take an hour or more to digest, so don’t click through if you do not want to take an hour learning about Our Lady of Guadalupe…)
In other words, Viganò felt impelled to write this essay by his own “Marian” devotion, feeling that Pope Francis a few days ago had somehow slighted the Blessed Virgin, somehow offered an offense to her great dignity, in remarks the Pope made in St. Peter’s Basilica on December 12.
Here are excerpts from a December 13 Crux article on what the Pope said on December 12:
Pope calls idea of declaring Mary Co-redemptrix ‘foolishness’
By Inés San Martín
Dec 13, 2019 ROME BUREAU CHIEF
ROME — Pope Francis appeared to flatly reject proposals in some theological circles to add “co-redemptrix” to the list of titles of the Virgin Mary [Note: meaning that, through her purity, her sinlessness, her suffering, Mary — whose purity and sinlessness were admittedly protected and preserved through the merit and saving grace of her Son, the sole, unique Savior of the world, Jesus — did nevertheless also contribute in a mysterious, but real, way to His redeeming work, hence merits the title of “co-redemptrix”] saying the mother of Jesus never took anything that belonged to her son, and calling the invention of new titles and dogmas “foolishness.”“She never wanted for herself something that was of her son,” Francis said. “She never introduced herself as co-redemptrix. No. Disciple,” he said, meaning that Mary saw herself as a disciple of Jesus. “Mary woman, Mary mother, without any other essential title,” Francis insisted. (…)
Here are links to other articles on what the Pope said on December 12, from Vatican News (link), Catholic News Agency (link) and a detailed statement from Dr. Mark Miravalle, leader of the movement in favor of proclaiming Mary as “Co-redemptrix” (link). And here is a link to a petition made on December 12 by some Catholic to Pope Francis, protesting the perceived veneration of “Mother Earth” (Pachamama) in Catholic liturgies, instead of Mary (link).
Viganò’s Outrage
In quite strong language, Viganò responded to Pope Francis (the translations from the original Italian are my own and unofficial): “On the occasion of the Feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Pope Bergoglio (sic) once again gave vent to his evident impatience with Mary, which evokes the impatience of the Serpent in the story of the Fall(!), in that Proto-Gospel that prophesies the radical enmity established by God between the Woman and the Serpent, and the declared hostility of the latter who, until the consummation of the world, will try to undermine the heel of the Woman and to triumph over her and her posterity. What the pontiff said is a manifest aggression toward the sublime prerogatives and attributes that make the Immaculate Ever-Virgin Mother of God the feminine complement to the mystery of the incarnate Word, intimately associated with Him in the Economy of Redemption.”
Viganò continued: “With a couple of jokes, he [Pope Francis] struck at the heart of the Marian dogmas, and of the Christological dogmas connected to it.”And he (Vigano) added: “The Marian dogmas are the seal affixed to the Catholic truths of our faith, defined in the Councils of Nicaea, Ephesus and Chalcedon; they are the unbreakable bulwark against the Christological heresies and against the furious unleashing of the Gates of Hell. Those who ‘hybridize’ and profane them [that is, these Marian dogmas] show that they are on the side of the Enemy. Attacking Mary is attacking Christ himself. Attacking the Mother is rising up against the Son and rebelling against the very mystery of the Holy Trinity. The Immaculate Theotokos, ‘terrible as hosts and unfolded banners’ — acies ordinata (‘terrible as an army drawn up in battle array,’ Song of Songs 6:9) — will give battle to save the Church and will destroy the army of the Enemy who, released from the chains that held him, has declared war on her, and with his defeat, all the demonic pachamamas will return definitively to hell.”
The toughness of this language reflects a new attitude on Viganò’s part toward the situation of the Church. In this text, we are moving far beyond a retired Vatican official who is focusing on the coverup of sexual abuse in the hierarchy — ugly and tragic as that type of coverup may be.In this text, we find now a retired Vatican official speaking in apocalyptic terms of the loss of the Catholic faith itself — of final apostasy… beginning with the loss of due respect for the dignity of the Mother of God, Mary.And this, just before Christmas, when we celebrate that birth that changed the universe, that reconciled mankind and God.
Viganò makes specific points, then his essay rises to a high point in his general conclusion.He faults Pope Francis for not leading the Rosary with the faithful, “who filled the courtyard of San Damaso and the upper loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica during the time of St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.”
And he faults him for “the enthronement of that Amazonian idol on the Altar of the Confession in St. Peter’s” (at the end of the Synod on the Amazon Region in October). That moment was “nothing less than a declaration of war on the Lady and Patroness of all the Americas, who with her appearance to Juan Diegodestroyed the demonic idols and conquered the Indians for Christ and for the adoration of the ‘Most True and Only God,’ thanks to her maternal Mediation.”And he sums up: “And this is not a legend!”
Then the archbishop turns to the Church’s worship, her liturgy — the source and summit of Her spiritual life.Viganò continues: “A few weeks after the events at the end of the Synod that signaled the investiture of pachamama at the heart of Catholicism, we learned that the Conciliar disaster of the Novus Ordo Missae [the New rite of the Mass] is undergoing further modernizations, including the introduction of the word “Rugiada” [the “dew-fall”] in the Eucharistic Canon instead of the mention of the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Most Holy Trinity.
This is a further step in the direction of regression towards naturalization and the immanentization of Catholic worship, towards a Novissimus Ordo that is pantheistic and idolatrous.”In writing this, Viganò is suggesting that, by making a number of small changes in the liturgy, some Church leaders are even now preparing to alter the liturgy in profound ways in the near future.
Viganò then suggests that, when the Pachamama images were tossed into the Tiber River (on October 21), they were not really recovered from the Tiber by Rome’s police, because there is no videotape of the recovery. “The fact that such a spectacular operation has not caught the attention of some passer-by, equipped with a mobile phone to film and then relaunch the scoop on social networks, is also quite incredible,” he adds. The suggestion is that the images that were presented as recovered were other copies of the same images, not the actual ones tossed into the river.
And then Viganò has bis most scathing criticism yet of the reign and teaching of Pope Francis: “For more than six years now we have been poisoned by a false magisterium, a sort of extreme synthesis of all the ambiguous Conciliar formulations and of the post-Conciliar errors that have been ceaselessly spread, without most of us realizing it… “Thus, over the past few decades, the Mystical Body [of Christ, that is, the Church] has been slowly drained of its lifeblood [i.e., the truths of the faith] through an unstoppable haemorrhage: the sacred Deposit of the Faith has been gradually reduced to ruins, the Dogmas distorted, the Liturgy secularized and bit by bit profaned, the Moral Teaching sabotaged, the Priesthood reviled, the Eucharistic Sacrifice Protestantized and transformed into a Banquet meal… “Now the Church is lifeless, covered by metastasis, devastated. The people of God grope, illiterate and robbed of his Faith, in the darkness of chaos and division. In recent decades, the enemies of God have progressively burned two thousand years of Tradition. With unprecedented acceleration, thanks to the subversive goal of this pontificate supported by the powerful Jesuit Apparatus, a deadly coup degrace is being prepared against the Church.”
The retired archbishop’s meaning is clear: the time for temporizing is over, the time for a confrontation has arrived. Viganò then says Pope Francis has done something that Modernists do, “affirming what one wants to destroy, using vague and imprecise terms, promoting error without ever clearly formulating it. This is exactly what Pope Bergoglio does, with his dissolving amorphism of the Mysteries of the Faith, with the doctrinal approximation that is proper to him, through which he ‘hybridizes’ and demolishes the holiest dogmas, as he did with the Marian ones of the Ever-Virgin Mother of God.”
And here is his conclusion: “The result of this abuse is what we now have under our eyes: a Catholic Church that is no longer Catholic; a container emptied of its authentic content.”
And so, the archbishop says, it is time, finally, to act.And that action, Viganò says, begins by clinging to the Church, remaining in the Church, not leaving… and by praying.”
Now it’s our turn,” he writes. “Without misunderstanding, without letting ourselves be driven away by this Church of which we are legitimate children and in which we have the sacrosanct right to feel at home, without the hateful horde of the enemies of Christ making us feel marginalized, schismatic and excommunicated. Now it’s up to us! The triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary — Coredemptrix and Mediatrix of all graces — passes by way of her “little ones”… St. Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort asked himself: ‘But when will this triumph occur? God alone knows it.’ Our task is to watch and pray as ardently recommended by St. Catherine of Siena: ‘Alas! I die and I can’t die. Do not sleep in negligence anymore; use what is possible in the present time. Comfort yourself in Christ Jesus’ sweet love. Drown yourself in the Blood of Christ crucified, place yourself on the cross with the crucified Christ, hide in the wounds of the crucified Christ, bathe in the blood of the crucified Christ’ (Letter 16).”
Viganò concludes: “The Church is shrouded in the darkness of modernism, but victory belongs to Our Lord and to his Bride [the Church]. We want to continue to profess the perennial faith of the Church in the face of the roar of Evil that besieges Her. We want to watch with Her and with Jesus, in this new Gethsemane of the end of all times — to pray and to do penance in reparation for the many offenses inflicted on the Church and on Our Lord.” The text of the archbishop is signed as follows: + Carlo Maria Viganò Archbishop. tit. of Ulpiana Apostolic Nuncio 19 December 2019====================
They say the first step is admitting you have a problem. I think many readers of this article will respond with outrage, and many will see it says things they already knew to be true—and I think these two groups will largely overlap. The most powerful obstacle to confronting a destructive addiction is denial, and collectively we are in denial about pornography.
Since it seems somehow relevant, let me state at the outset that I am French. Every fiber of my Latin, Catholic body recoils at puritanism of any sort, especially the bizarre, Anglo-Puritan kind so prevalent in America. I believe eroticism is one of God’s greatest gifts to humankind, prudishness a bizarre aberration, and not so long ago, hyperbolic warnings about the perils of pornography, whether from my Evangelical Christian or progressive feminist friends, had me rolling my eyes.
Not anymore. I have become deadly serious. A few years ago, a friend—unsurprisingly, a female friend—mentioned that there was strong medical evidence for the proposition that online pornography is a lot more dangerous than most people suspect. Since I was skeptical, I looked into it. I became intrigued and kept following the evolving science, as well as online testimonies, off and on. It didn’t take me long to understand that my friend is right. In fact, the more I delved into the subject, the more alarmed I became.
The central contention of this article is that, however we might feel morally about pornography in general, a number of features about pornography as it has actually existed for the past decade or so, with the emergence of “Tube” sites that provide endless, instant, high-definition video in 2006, and the proliferation of smartphones and tablets since 2007, is fundamentally different from anything we’ve previously experienced.
A scientific consensus is emerging that today’s porn is truly a public health menace: its new incarnation combines with some evolutionarily-designed features of our brain to make it uniquely addictive, on par with any drug you might name—and uniquely destructive. The evidence is in: porn is as addictive as smoking, or more, except that what smoking does to your lungs, porn does to your brain.
The damage is real, and it’s profound. The scientific evidence has mounted: certain evolutionarily-designed features of our neurobiology not only mean that today’s porn is profoundly addictive, but that this addiction—which, at this point, must include the majority of all males—has been rewiring our brains in ways that have had a profoundly damaging impact on our sexuality, our relationships, and our mental health.
Furthermore, I believe that it is also having a far-reaching impact on our social fabric as a whole—while it is impossible to demonstrate any cause-and-effect relationship scientifically beyond a reasonable doubt when it comes to broad social trends, I believe the evidence is still compelling or, at least, highly suggestive.
Indeed, it is so compelling that I now believe that online porn addiction is the number one public health challenge facing the West today.
If the evidence is so strong and the damage so deep and pervasive, why is nobody talking about this? Well—why did it take so long for society to admit, and respond to, the evidence on the harms of smoking? In part because, even when emerging scientific evidence is quite solid, in the best of worlds there is always a lag between specialists making a discovery and academic gatekeepers embracing it, thereby granting it the social stamp of authority of scientific consensus. In part it is because, for many of us, our background assumption is that “porn” means something similar to Playboy and lingerie catalogues. In part, it is because of widespread (and, in my view, mistaken) assumptions about what important values like free speech, gender equality, and sexual health entail. In part it is because deep-monied interests have a stake in the status quo. And in very large parts, it is because most of us are now addicts—and like good addicts, we are in denial.
Porn Is the New Smoking
I’ve been a smoker since my early 20s. I have said things like, “I can quit any time,” “I just do it because I enjoy it,” “My grandmother smoked for decades and she’s perfectly healthy,” while feeling secret shame for not being able to climb a flight of stairs without losing my breath. No form of delusion is more powerful than self-delusion.
Anti-porn advocates like the phrase “porn is the new smoking.” Call today the beginnings of the “Mad Men” stage of the process, then: the time when most people still see smoking as harmless, but the scientific evidence is starting to pile up, and the drip-drip-drip of new data is just starting to be heard beyond specialist circles of academia and the few kooks who had a hunch all along that this was nastier than it looked. We can hope, some time not too long from now, we will look at today’s jokes about PornHub with the same mix of bafflement and shame we feel when we see 1950s ads with slogans like “More Doctors Smoke Camel Than Any Other Cigarette.”
So, what is this new scientific data?
The first step is to look at the evidence on the effect of porn on the chemistry of the brain. It is an understatement to say that mammals, particularly males, are wired by evolution to seek out sexual stimulation. When we get it, a deep part of our brain called the reward center, which we share with most mammals and whose job it is to make us feel good when we do things we are evolutionarily designed to seek, releases the neurotransmitter dopamine.
Dopamine is sometimes called “the pleasure hormone,” but this is an oversimplification; it would be more accurate to call it “the desire hormone” or “the craving hormone”. Crucially, the release of dopamine starts not with the reward itself, but with the anticipation of reward. The reward center’s job is to make us crave those things which we are evolutionarily designed to crave—starting with sex and food.
It’s not exactly a scoop that humans are wired to seek out sexual stimulation, is it? No, but today’s internet porn plays differently with our reward system. The design of mammals’ reward system causes something scientists call the Coolidge Effect.
It is named after an old joke: President Calvin Coolidge and the First Lady are separately visiting a farm. Mrs. Coolidge visits the chicken yard and sees the rooster mating a lot. She asks how often that happens, and is told, “Dozens of times each day.” Mrs. Coolidge responds, “Tell that to the president when he comes by.” Upon being told, the president asks, “Same hen every time?” “Oh, no, Mr. President, a different hen every time.” “Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge.”
Hence, the Coolidge Effect. If you place a male rat in a box with several female rats in heat, the rat will immediately begin to mate with all the female rats, until it is utterly exhausted. The female rats, still wanting sexual congress, will nudge and lick the drained animal, but at some point he will simply stop responding—until you put a new female in the box, at which point the male will suddenly awaken and proceed to mate with the new female.
It’s a good (albeit corny) joke. But the Coolidge Effect is also one of the most robust findings in science. It has been replicated in all mammals, and most other animals (some species of cricket don’t have it). The evolutionary imperative is to spread genes as widely as possible, which makes the Coolidge Effect a very suitable adaptation. Neurochemically, this means that our brain produces more dopamine with novel partners. And—this is the crucial bit—on Tube sites, each new porn scene our brain interprets as a new partner. In a study, the same porn film was shown repeatedly to a group of men, and they found that arousal declined with each new viewing—until a new film was shown, at which point arousal shot right back up to the same level as when the men were shown the film the first time.
This is one of the critical ways in which today’s porn is fundamentally different from yesterday’s: unlike Playboy, online porn provides literally infinite novelty with no effort. With Tube sites and a broadband connection, you can have a new clip—what your brain interprets as a new partner—literally every minute, every second. And with laptops, smartphones and tablets, they can be accessed everywhere, 24/7, immediately.
This can be likened to what Nobel laureate Nikolaas Tinbergen called a superstimulus: something artificial that provides a stimulus that our brains are evolutionarily wired to seek, but at a level way beyond what we are evolutionarily prepared to cope with, wreaking havoc on our brains. Tinbergen found that female birds could spend their lives struggling to sit on giant fake, brightly-colored eggs while leaving their own, paler eggs to die. An increasing number of scientists believe the obesity epidemic is the result of a superstimulus: products like refined sugar are textbook examples of an artificial version of something we’re designed to seek, in a concentrated form that doesn’t exist in nature and that our bodies aren’t prepared for.
Evolution could not prepare our brains for the neurochemical rush of an always-on kaleidoscope of sexual novelty. This makes online porn uniquely addictive—just like a drug. Some scientists believe that the reason why chemical drugs can be so addictive is that they trigger our neurochemical reward mechanisms linked to sex; heroin addicts often claim that shooting up “feels like an orgasm.” A 2010 study on rats found that methamphetamine use activated the same reward systems and the same circuitry as sex.
(Along with dolphins and some higher primates, rats are the only mammals who mate for pleasure as well as reproduction; and humans’ sex reward systems are neurologically basically the same as rats’, since they are one of the least evolved parts of our brains. These factors make the little critters excellent test subjects for experiments on the neurochemistry of human sexuality. Yes, when it comes to sex, us men are basically rats. The more you know . . . )
What’s more, no one is born with a reward circuitry wired in their brain for alcohol, or cocaine—but everyone is born with a hardwired reward system for sexual stimulation. Addiction research has shown that not all people have a predisposition to addiction to chemical substances—only if you have a genetic predisposition can your brain’s reward system be tricked into mistaking a particular chemical for sex. This is why some people become alcoholics even after being exposed to moderate amounts of alcohol, while others (like me) can drink heavily without developing an addiction, or why some people can have just one cigarette at a party and then not worry about it while others (like me) must have their nicotine fix every day. By contrast, all of us have a predisposition to addiction to sexual stimulus.
Another well-established evolutionary mechanism is something called the bingeing effect. We evolved under conditions of resource scarcity, which meant it was evolutionarily advantageous to have a reward system programmed to give us a very strong drive to binge whenever we hit a motherlode of something. But putting mammals wired for the bingeing effect in an environment of abundance can wreak havoc on their brains. (The bingeing effect has also been linked to obesity.)
If our reward system interprets each new porn clip as the same thing as a new sexual partner, this means an unprecedented sort of stimulus for our brain. Not comparable to Playboy, or even ’90s-era dial-up downloads. Even decadent Roman emperors, Turkish sultans, and 1970s rock stars never had 24/7, one-click-away-access to infinitely many, infinitely novel sexual partners.
The combination of a pre-existing natural circuit for neurochemical reward linked to sexual stimulus and the possibility of immediate, infinite novelty—which, again, was not a feature of porn until 2006—means that a user can now keep his dopamine levels much higher, and for much longer periods of time, than we can possibly hope our brains to handle without real and lasting damage.
Theory vs. Practice in Today’s Porn
So, that’s the theory. What about the practice? The evidence has been gradually piling up; at this point, we can say that the scientific evidence that online porn works on our brains just like cocaine or alcohol or tobacco, while recent, is very strong.
A consensus has been slow to emerge in part because of a broader issue: addiction researchers traditionally have been reluctant to use “addiction” as a label for behaviors that don’t involve chemical substances, understandably so since our therapeutic culture tends to put many things under the label “addiction.” We all collectively rolled our eyes when prominent men felled by #MeToo piously blamed “sex addiction” and announced their intention to go to rehab, and we were right to.
But our cultural need to put all sorts of dysfunctional behavior under the addiction label (“shopping addiction”!) is not the same thing as the science of addiction, and advances in brain imaging techniques have tilted the scales in favor of the view that addiction is a brain disease, not a chemical disease.
A landmark 2016 paper by Nora D. Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and George F. Koob, director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, in the New England Journal of Medicine, went over new neuroscience and brain imaging data and concluded that it supports the “brain disease model of addiction.” The scientific definition of addiction is shifting to one that looks at specific things happening inside the brain causing people to exhibit certain patterns of behavior, as opposed to whether a patient is hooked on a particular chemical compound.
Online porn fits this model. Slowly, the evidence has been piling up, and it looks, by now, overwhelming: porn does do the same things to our brains as addictive substances.
A 2011 study on the self-reported experiences of 89 males found “parallels between cognitive and brain mechanisms potentially contributing to the maintenance of excessive cybersex and those described for individuals with substance dependence.” A 2014 Cambridge University study watched people’s brains through an MRI machine; Valerie Voon, the study’s lead author, summarized the findings thus: “There are clear differences in brain activity between patients who have compulsive sexual behaviour and healthy volunteers.”
Another Cambridge University study the same year, this time comparing porn addicts’ responses to psychological tests to the responses of normal subjects, found that “sexually explicit videos were associated with greater activity in a neural network similar to that observed in drug-cue-reactivity studies.” Almost all of the neuroscience studies on this topic find the same result: online porn use does the same things to our brains as drug addiction.
But don’t take my word for it. Scientists have done many reviews of the literature. Only one review that I am aware of, from 2014, disputes the idea of online porn addiction; it’s the only review that doesn’t look at brain and brain-scan studies, and combines studies from before the Tube era and after. Meanwhile, a thorough 2015 review of the neuroscience literature on internet porn found that “neuroscientific research supports the assumption that underlying neural processes (of online porn addiction) are similar to substance addiction” and that “Internet pornography addiction fits into the addiction framework and shares similar basic mechanisms with substance addiction.” Another 2015 review found that “Neuroimaging studies support the assumption of meaningful commonalities between cybersex addiction and other behavioral addictions as well as substance dependency.” A 2018 review found the same thing:
Recent neurobiological studies have revealed that compulsive sexual behaviors are associated with altered processing of sexual material and differences in brain structure and function. . . . existing data suggest neurobiological abnormalities share communalities with other additions such as substance use and gambling disorders.
In January 2019, a team of researchers published a paper straightforwardly titled “Online Porn Addiction: What We Know and What We Don’t—A Systematic Review” which concluded, “as far as we know, a number of recent studies support (problematic use of online pornography) as an addiction.” It’s hard to call this anything but overwhelming evidence.
The studies have been done in numerous countries, and using various methods, from neuro-imaging to surveys to experiments and, to varying degrees, they all say the same thing.
All right, you might respond, online porn addiction may be a real thing, but does that mean we need to freak out? After all, smoking and heroin will kill you, serious cannabis addiction will melt your brain, alcohol addiction will wreak havoc in your life—compared to that, how bad can porn addiction be?
The answer, it turns out, is: pretty bad.
Let’s start with what we all know about addiction: you need more and more of your drug to get less and less of a kick; this is the cycle which makes addiction so destructive. The reason for this is that addiction simply rewires the circuitry of our brain.
When the reward center of our brain is activated, it releases chemicals that make us feel good. Mainly dopamine, as we’ve seen, and also a protein called DeltaFosB. Its function is to strengthen the neural pathways that dopamine travels, deepening the neural connection between the buzz we get and whatever we’re doing or experiencing when we get it. DeltaFosB is important for learning new skills: if you keep practicing that golf swing until you get it right, you feel a burst of joy—that’s dopamine—, while the accompanying release of DeltaFosB helps your brain remember how to do it again. It’s a very clever system.
But DeltaFosB is also responsible for making addiction possible. Addictive drugs activate the same nerve cells activated during sexual arousal, which is why we derive pleasure from them. But we become addicted to them when DeltaFosB, essentially, has reprogrammed our brain’s reward system, originally written to make us seek out sex (and food), to make it seek out that chemical instead. This is why addiction is so powerful: the addict’s urge is really our most powerful evolutionary urge, hijacked. And since online pornography is a sexual stimulus to begin with, we are all predisposed, and it takes much less rewiring for consumption to cause addiction.
As we’ll see, this neurobiological feature of our brains has far-reaching implications for the effect porn addiction has on us: on our sexuality, on our relationships, and even on society at large.
Porn Kills the Urge for Real Sex
Porn is a sexual stimulus, but it is not sex. Notoriously, heroin addicts eventually lose interest in sex: this is because their brains are rewired so that their sex reward system is reprogrammed to seek out heroin rather than sex. In the same way, as we consume more and more porn, which we must since it is addictive and we need more to get the same kick, our brain is rewired so that what triggers the reward system that is supposed to be linked to sex is no longer linked to sex—to a human in the flesh, to touching, to kissing, to caressing—but to porn.
Which is why we are witnessing a phenomenon which, as best as anyone can tell, is totally unprecedented in all of human history: an epidemic of chronic erectile dysfunction (ED) among men under 40. The evidence is earth-shattering: since the Kinsey report in the 1940s, studies have found roughly the same, stable rates of chronic ED: less than 1 percent among men younger than 30, less than 3 percent in men aged 30-45.
As of this writing, at least ten studies published since 2010 report a tremendous rise in ED. Rates of ED among men under 40 ranged from 14 percent to 37 percent, and rates of low libido from 16 percent to 37 percent. No variable related to youthful ED has meaningfully changed since then, except for one: the advent of on-demand video porn in 2006. It’s worth repeating: we went from less than 1 percent of erectile dysfunction in young men to 14 to 37 percent, an increase of several orders of magnitude.
Online forums are full of anguished reports from young men about ED. An agonizing story is eerily common: a young man has his first sexual experience; his girlfriend is willing, he loves her or at least is attracted to her, but finds himself simply unable to sustain an erection (though he is perfectly able to maintain one when he watches porn). Many more report a milder version of the same problem: during sex with their girlfriend, they must visualize pornographic movies in their heads to sustain their erection. They are not fantasizing about something they like more: they want to be present, want to be aroused by a real woman’s scent and touch. They understand perfectly well how absurd it is to be more attracted by the substitute than by the real thing, and it distresses them. Some must put hardcore pornography on in the background in order to be able to have sex with their girlfriends (and, incredibly, the girlfriends agree to this).
Fred Wilson, an internet venture capitalist and thought leader, commenting on digital natives’ uncanny ease with new technology, once quipped that there are only two kinds of people: those who first got access to the internet after they lost their virginity, and those who got it before. My family got the internet in the late ’90s when I was a preteen, and so I belong to the latter category, and yet I feel like Grandpa Simpson when I read those testimonies and compare them to my early sexual experiences (which were, I assure you, quite unremarkable). Then again, back in my day, cars got 40 rods to the hogshead, and online pornography meant an endless maze of text link directories and broken search engines with dead links, slow-to-load images, short video clips you had to download, frustrating paywalls guarding the “good stuff”—not Tube sites with infinite, immediate, streaming, high-definition video, 24/7, in your pocket, for free, driven by powerful algorithms designed by data scientists to maximize user engagement.
Imagine that we discovered that some bacteria were causing ED to jump from 1 percent to 14 to 37 percent—there would be a national panic, cable news networks would go wall-to-wall, Congress would be holding hearings every day, state and federal prosecutors would be on a hunt for perpetrators to make the Mueller and Starr investigations look like an Amazon customer satisfaction survey. Collectively, we would take very seriously the alarming possibility that anything that could cause something like this was bound to have other, likely profound, effects on human health and social life.
Last year, an article in The Atlantic went viral after it decried a “sex recession” among young people. Young people are simply having less and less sex. The author, Kate Julian, noted that the phenomenon is not exclusive to the United States but is prevalent across the West—Sweden’s health minister called its declining sex rates (even Sweden is having less sex!) “a political problem,” in part because it risks negatively impacting the country’s fertility.
Julian also noted that Japan has been a precursor, entering its sex recession earlier—and that it is also “among the world’s top producers and consumers of porn, and the originator of whole new porn genres” and “a global leader in the design of high-end sex dolls.” To her credit, she seriously looked into porn as a probable cause for the sex recession, although none of the voluminous subsequent commentary on the piece I can recall reading discussed this potential cause.
Now, a conservative like myself might think that young people having less sex might not be such a bad thing! And it is true that over the same period, pathologies such as teen pregnancies and teen STDs have declined. Except that whatever the causes, I think we can safely rule out a religious revival or a sudden upsurge of traditional values. Whatever we might believe men shoulddo about their sexual urges, if young healthy men aren’t having sexual urges at all in massive, unprecedented numbers, that is surely a sign of something wrong with their health.
Warping the Brain
Perhaps young people aren’t having sex because the men can’t get it up. Or perhaps it’s because women don’t want to have sex with those men who can do it, but whose brains have been warped by porn.
Because porn does warp the brain. The basic mechanism of porn addiction, you’ll recall, is that when we watch porn, we get a jolt of dopamine, and when we do, we get a follow-up dose of DeltaFosB that rewires our brain to link sexual desire with porn—but not just to any porn. To the porn we watch.
Remember the Coolidge Effect: the thing that causes a veritable flood of dopamine and makes online porn a “superstimulus” that breaks our brains, unlike Uncle Ted’s Playboy collection, is novelty.
Like all addictions, online porn has diminishing returns. We need more. We need new. And the easiest way to get it—especially on Tube sites, which, like YouTube and Netflix, “helpfully” provide suggestions all around the video you’re watching, generated by algorithms programmed to keep viewers glued and coming back—is new genres. Just a click away. And there’s infinitely many.
In 2014, researchers at the Max Planck Institute used fMRI to look at the brains of porn users. They found that more porn use correlated with less grey matter in the reward system, and less reward circuit activation while viewing sexual photos—in other words, porn users were desensitized. “We therefore assume that subjects with high pornography consumption require ever stronger stimuli to reach the same reward level,” the authors wrote.
Another study, this time from Cambridge University in 2015, also used fMRI, this time to compare the brains of sex addicts and healthy patients. As the accompanying press release put it, the researchers found that “when the sex addicts viewed the same sexual image repeatedly, compared to the healthy volunteers they experienced a greater decrease of activity in the region of the brain known as the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, known to be involved in anticipating rewards and responding to new events. This is consistent with ‘habituation’, where the addict finds the same stimulus less and less rewarding.”
But it’s not just sex addicts who show this behavior. When the healthy patients repeatedly were shown the same porn video, they got less and less aroused; but, “when they then view a new video, the level of interest and arousal goes back to the original level.” In other words, it doesn’t take much for the addiction mechanism to kick in, since we’re already genetically predisposed to seek out sexual stimulus.
The bottom line is the syndrome doesn’t just make us crave more, it makes us crave novelty. And what kind of novelty, specifically? Empirically, it’s not just any kind of novel. In practice, what most triggers the Coolidge Effect is what produces surprise, or shock. In other words, like water flowing downhill, we are drawn to porn that is increasingly taboo—specifically, more violent and degrading.
The Disturbing Shock Drive of Porn
Recently, comedian Ryan Creamer became a viral online sensation after it surfaced that he had created a channel on PornHub, the world’s biggest “YouTube for porn” site, where he posted, as Buzzfeed aptly described it, “hilariously wholesome and uplifting videos.” Creamer’s G-rated videos invert online porn clichés, featuring him in his best impression of Ned Flanders, with titles like “I Hug You and Say I Had a Really Good Time Tonight” and “POV FOREHEAD KISS COMPILATION” (“POV” stands for “point of view,” or videos filmed from a character’s first-person perspective; compilations are a rising online porn genre, another data point to show widespread habituation: even a new video doesn’t have enough novelty, we need quick-cut montages).
None of the commentary pointed out the obvious implication: his stunt captured people’s imagination precisely because almost all of PornHub—what its sophisticated algorithms know its viewers want—is not just pornographic in some abstract sense, but nasty, shocking, and degrading.
One of Creamer’s videos is titled “I, Your Step Brother, Decline Your Advances but Am Flattered Nonetheless”; last year, Esquire reported) that “incest is the fastest growing trend in porn.” (Tube sites ban videos that explicitly refer to incest, but it is still full of videos featuring “stepdads” and “stepmoms” and “half-brothers” that everyone understands to mean “dads,” “moms,” and “brothers.”)
Another rising popular genre has been so-called “interracial” porn, which nearly always means a specific type of interracial congress: black men and white women. The genre is inevitably based on the worst racial stereotypes and imagery. And interracial porn not only has been getting more popular, and more degrading to women, but more racist. As conservative writers who opposed Trump in 2016 found out from their Twitter mentions, a newly popular genre is “cuckolding,” which involves a white man watching his wife or girlfriend have sex with a black man (or several). When mainstream media outlets notice the phenomenon, it is taken as evidence of white Americans’ deep racism. No doubt buried racial attitudes must play a role, but consider the trendline; if hidden racism is the main cause, why should racist porn suddenly explode in popularity while most surveys say racial attitudes are either holding steady or slowly improving? If you keep in mind the sudden popularity of incest porn, the hypothesis that it is widespread desensitization due to addiction which is causing the rise becomes much more plausible.
It’s worth pausing to note the denial-driven disconnect between what we talk about and what we all know to be happening. Earlier this year, the country went into a moral panic when it was discovered the governor of Virginia had once worn blackface as part of a costume as a medical student; meanwhile, there is a massively popular and fast-growing genre of entertainment that makes minstrel shows look like a racial sensitivity seminar, and almost nobody talks about it.
Shock is what best triggers the Coolidge Effect, and taboo-breaking is shocking, by definition; it is a Pavlovian response to shock and surprise from our rat-like reward system. If we had a deep societal taboo against humping tables, table-humping porn suddenly would be exploding in popularity. Instead, we have deep societal taboos against incest, racism . . . and violence against women.
Intensifying the High
Kink dot com is one of the top brands in porn. The studio’s specialty is extreme fetishes related to BDSM. Its trajectory is telling. The site was founded all the way back in the dark ages of the internet, in 1997. Sado-masochism as a sexual fetish is as old as man, of course—the 2nd-century Roman poet Juvenal mocks it in his Satires, for example. But, as best as we can tell, like most fetishes it has only ever appealed to a small minority throughout human history. And indeed, Kink spent the better part of its first decade in existence humming along out of view, a little-known small business serving its niche.
Then, some time in the mid-to-late 2000s, the site exploded in popularity, to the point of becoming as close to a cultural phenomenon as a porn site can be. You can trace its sudden growth in popularity—and mainstream appeal. In 2007, the New York Times Magazine profiled the company. In 2009, it received its first mainstream adult industry award. In 2013, the Hollywood actor James Franco produced a documentary about the company.
That same year, the writer Emily Witt wrote a long, meditative first-person essay for the intellectual progressive magazine n+1 on modern sexuality. For her report, among other things, she attended a shoot for “Public Disgrace,” one of Kink’s “channels” that features, as its tagline says, “women bound, stripped, and punished in public.” The filmings happen in public places like bars or shops that the company rents out for the occasion, and strangers off the street are invited to perform sexual acts on the “bound, stripped” actress.
Kink has expanded and expanded to match its sudden success, going from a handful of channels to, as of this writing, 78, and spawning an array of copycats (many even more extreme, naturally). While the company’s PR materials boast of a feminist, egalitarian, empowering view of sexuality, almost all of its actual content features men degrading women rather than the other way around.
Kink’s rise from niche to marquee just happens to coincide with the arrival of Tube sites in 2006, which are uniquely effective at triggering the Coolidge Effect and turning porn addicts into novelty-seeking machines. It’s important to note that, while an attraction to what you might call “light kink”—fluffy pink handcuffs, a rhinestone-bedazzled blindfold, that sort of thing—has been hovering around in our popular culture for decades, and therefore some version of this has been part of pornography for ages, Kink is the real article. It’s not just acting. Women are caned and whipped until they are bruised and red. Not only are the sex acts themselves extreme (you name it, it’s there), but scenes are scripted around the psychological and symbolic, not just physical, degradation of the woman. Fifty Shades of Grey is to Kink as a Hitchcock movie is to a snuff film.
When the films have a storyline, it can usually be summed up with one word: rape. Or two words: brutal rape. It’s one thing to be aroused by a sadomasochistic scene where the sub (as the term of art goes) is shown visibly enjoying the treatment; it’s quite another to be aroused by watching a woman scream in agony and despair as she is held down and violently raped.
One series of Kink videos is based on the following concept: the pornstar is alone in a room with several men; the director explains to her (and we watch) that if she can leave the room, she gets cash; for each article of clothing she still has on at the end of the scene, she gets cash; for each sex act that one of the men gets to perform on her, he gets cash and she loses money. One has to grant them a devilish kind of cleverness: it lets them enact an actual violent rape with legal impunity. The woman really resists; the men really force themselves brutally on her. Of course, she “consented” to the whole thing, which, somehow, makes it legal.
Kink is a revealing example because of its particular focus on degradation, and its sudden, inexplicable, overnight jump from a little-known niche site to one of the most popular media brands of any kind on the planet, right after Tube sites appeared. But the key phenomenon is that virtually all pornography, very much including the “vanilla stuff,” has grown more extreme, and specifically more violent, and specifically more misogynistic and degrading towards women. Oh, nonviolent pornography still exists, if you can find it. What used to be mainstream is now niche, and vice versa.
I want to carefully unpack this so that what I’m saying isn’t misunderstood. For whatever reasons, male fantasies around female reluctance, around power, coercion, and domination, are as old as life itself (as indeed are female fantasies on these themes). Genres of pornography, and sexual fantasy more broadly, that happen in the grey areas, even dark grey areas, of female consent to sex, have always been around and have always been popular. It’s therefore tempting to look at something like Kink, and the general rise in degrading porn, as simply just another manifestation of that age-old proclivity, and not some new thing. But this is just not true.
Historically, sexual fantasies that involved some measure of coercion may have aroused many men, but those same men were disgusted by violent rape and brutal degradation. The point is not to “defend” the former or to deny that they represent something dark and condemnable in the human soul—of course they do. The point is simply to say that something has changed, seriously, dramatically, and seemingly overnight.
We are told that people’s sexual proclivities are hard-wired from birth or perhaps from early childhood experiences, but science says they can and do change. In a famous experiment, researchers sprayed female rats—yes, rats again—with the odor of a dead rat body, which rats instinctively flee from, and introduced virgin male rats. The male rats mated with the females nonetheless—so far, so mammalian. But, crucially, when those same male rats were later placed in a cage with various toys, they preferred to play with the ones that smelled like death. The sexual stimulus had rewired their reward system. In a scientific survey of online porn users in Belgium, 49 percent “mentioned at least sometimes searching for sexual content or being involved in [online sexual activities] that were not previously interesting to them or that they considered disgusting.”
Once you are addicted to online porn, the thing that provides the biggest dopamine jolt is whatever is most shocking. And the reward cycle means you need a bigger dopamine boost every time—something newer, more shocking. And each time, DeltaFosB rewires your brain, creating and strengthening the Pavlovian mechanism by which you do become attracted to those shocking images, and in the process overwriting the neural pathways which link normal sex—you know, nonviolent, non-incestuous—to the reward center.
Crucially, this overturns the prevailing narrative on porn’s impact on our sexuality. This says that the only problem with deviant porn is viewers thinking “it’s normal,” and therefore, as long as they are educated that it is not, they can safely enjoy their fantasy without harming themselves or their partners. It would be better if it were so, but the evidence shows that this is dead wrong. Alcoholics don’t drink themselves to an early grave because they somehow haven’t been made aware of enough facts about the dangers of drinking—indeed, they know all too well, and the shame this causes is a classic trigger for more bingeing.
Porn works at the same fundamental level, the level of our primal, rat-like, reward center, the part of our brain honed by millions of years of evolution to be the wellspring of our most powerful urges. Porn doesn’t change what we think, at least not directly, it changes what we crave.
Changing What We Crave
In 2007, two researchers tried to do an experiment, initially unrelated to porn, studying sexual arousal in men in general. They tried to induce the subjects’ arousal in a lab setting by showing them video porn, but ran into a (to them) shocking problem: half of the men, who were aged 29 on average, couldn’t get aroused. The horrified researchers eventually identified the problem: they were showing them old-fashioned porn—the researchers presumably were older and less internet-savvy than their subjects.
“Conversations with the subjects reinforced our idea that in some of them a high exposure to erotica seemed to have resulted in a lower responsivity to ‘vanilla sex’ erotica and an increased need for novelty and variation, in some cases combined with a need for very specific types of stimuli in order to get aroused,” they wrote.
Incredibly, porn can even affect our sexual orientation. A 2016 study found that “many men viewed sexually explicit material (SEM) content inconsistent with their stated sexual identity. It was not uncommon for heterosexual-identified men to report viewing SEM containing male same-sex behavior (20.7 percent) and for gay-identified men to report viewing heterosexual behavior in SEM (55.0 percent).” Meanwhile, in its “2018 Year in Review,” PornHub disclosed that “interest in ‘trans’ (aka transgender) porn saw significant gains in 2018, in particular with a 167 percent increase in searches by men and more than 200 percent with visitors over the age of 45 (becoming the fifth most searched terms by those aged 45 to 64).”
When this phenomenon is discussed at all, the prevailing narrative is that these men are repressed and discover their “true” sexual orientation through porn—except that the men report that the attraction goes away when they quit online porn.
This is astonishing. The point is not to try to start a moral panic about the internet turning men gay—the point is that it’s not turning them gay.
But perhaps it’s turning at least some men into something else. Andrea Long Chu is the name of an American transgender writer, who writes with admirable honesty about her gender transition and experience. For example, Chu braved criticism from trans activists by writing in a New York Times essay about the links between her gender transition and chronic depression, and denying that her transition operation will make her happy. In a paper at an academic conference at Columbia, Chu asked: “Did sissy porn make me trans?” Sissy porn is a genre—again, once extremely obscure and inexplicably, suddenly growing into the mainstream—where men dressed like women perform sex acts with men in stereotypically submissive, female roles. Sissy porn is closely related to the genre known as “forced feminization,” which is pretty much just what it sounds like. In a recent book, Chu essentially answers her own question: “Yes.”
It’s unclear—unknowable, perhaps—to what extent Chu’s experience matches up with the increasing rate of sexual transitions, but even if her example is purely anecdotal, it should serve to underscore the point: porn rewires our brain at a fundamental level and changes what we crave. And that should alarm us regardless of what we believe about transgender issues.
Porn Also Affects Relationships
Let’s pause and review: we’ve established that today’s porn is neurochemically addictive like a hard drug, and that this addiction is having a widespread and alarming impact on sexuality, from never-before-seen rates of erectile dysfunction to the growing popularity of extreme fetishes to (potentially) the “sex recession.” That’s surely bad.
But, to play devil’s advocate, is it really that bad?
Alcoholism or heroin addiction, say, will not just wreck someone’s sexuality—which they will—but their entire lives and those of people around them. Directly and indirectly, they are responsible for countless deaths every year. It sounds like we should be concerned about porn, sure, but should we really hit the panic button?
Well, one preliminary answer is that porn addiction affects our lives beyond just sexuality—which makes intuitive sense since, after all, sex touches all areas of our lives.
First, porn affects addicts’ views of women. The idea that porn is “just a fantasy”—that watching degrading porn doesn’t make one more likely to develop misogynistic or sexual pathological tendencies any more than watching a Jason Bourne movie means you’re likely to start punching and shooting people—may or may not have been true in the Playboy era, but it’s definitely not true now.
A 2015 literature review looked at 22 studies from seven different countries and found a link between consumption of online pornography and sexual aggression.
An academic review of no less than 135 peer-reviewed studies found “consistent evidence” linking online porn addiction to, among other things, “greater support for sexist beliefs,” “adversarial sexist beliefs,” a “greater tolerance of sexual violence toward women,” as well as “a diminished view of women’s competence, morality, and humanity.”
To repeat: a diminished view of women’s . . . morality, and humanity. What have we done?
Given all of that, from endemic ED to increased sexual fetishism and even misogyny, it should come as no surprise that porn addiction is having a negative impact on relationships.
A 2017 meta-analysis of 50 studies, collectively including more than 50,000 participants from 10 countries, found a link between pornography consumption and “lower interpersonal satisfaction outcomes,” whether in cross-sectional surveys, longitudinal surveys, or laboratory experiments.
Another study of nationally representative data found that porn use was a strong predictor of “significantly lower levels of marital quality”—the second strongest predictor of all the variables in the survey. This effect showed after the authors controlled for confounding variables like dissatisfaction with sex life and marital decision-making: this suggests that porn use correlates with marital unhappiness not because spouses who become unhappy turn to porn, but rather that porn is the cause of the unhappiness.
Yet another study, using representative data from the General Social Survey, polling thousands of American couples every year from 2006 to 2014, found that “beginning pornography use between survey waves nearly doubled one’s likelihood of being divorced by the next survey period.” Most terrifying, the study found the group whose probability of divorce increased the most was couples who initially reported being “very happy” in their marriage and began using porn afterward.
The rebound effect of porn addiction on girlfriends and wives is very real. Popular culture is adamant that a liberated, open-minded woman must be relaxed about her partner’s use of porn. On “Friends,” that Rosetta’s Stone of American culture, Chandler’s chronic masturbation during his relationship with Monica was a recurring gag, and each time the show’s writers made the point of showing us Monica approved. In fact, despite the brainwashing, surveys say that large numbers of women disagree with their men using pornography while in a committed relationship. Finding out that your partner uses porn is often experienced, if not as a form of betrayal, then at least as a form of rejection—probably made worse by the fact that she “knows” she “can’t” object, and also by the fact that (unlike in the “Friends” era) she also knows that porn almost certainly means violent, degrading, misogynistic stuff (or worse).
The most obvious negative impact is on body image and self-esteem. A majority of women in one study described the discovery that their man uses porn as “traumatic“; they not only felt less desirable, they reported feelings of lower self-worth. Some women can experience symptoms of anxiety, depression, and even post-traumatic stress disorder.
the more pornography a man watches, the more likely he was to use it during sex, request particular pornographic sex acts of his partner, deliberately conjure images of pornography during sex to maintain arousal, and have concerns over his own sexual performance and body image. Further, higher pornography use was negatively associated with enjoying sexually intimate behaviors with a partner.
We can’t prove a direct causal link between porn addiction and the “sex recession,” but come on: even putting aside skyrocketing ED, given what porn addiction does to male sexuality, from the female perspective, sex with a male porn addict sounds like an experiment you don’t want to repeat—and at this point, it’s a fair bet that most young men are porn addicts.
Given all this, while we don’t have enough research yet to make a scientifically-conclusive judgment, I highly suspect a link between male (especially teen) porn use and the widely-reported and sudden increase in depression and other neuropathologies among young women. Writing as a former teenage male, I will posit that even in the best of times most teenage males are not the best kinds of human beings, especially for teenage girls; I can scarcely imagine what it must be like to be a teenage girl when close to 100 percent (as we might safely assume) of the potential relationship pool is porn-addicted.
Not that pornography only affects sexual and romantic relationships. Porn causes loneliness. In part, this is because it is true of all addiction, which typically causes powerful feelings of shame that make us want to avoid or even push away other people. And addiction causes us to engage in antisocial behavior: though I wasn’t able to find a study, there are many online testimonies of people losing their job because they couldn’t stop themselves visiting porn sites at work.
According to a study by Ana Bridges, a University of Arkansas psychologist who focuses on porn’s impact on relationships, online porn users report “increased secrecy, less intimacy and also more depression.”
Porn Addiction Causes Brain Damage
Once we understand today’s porn, it makes intuitive sense that it would negatively affect relationships, given its impact on sexuality, views of women, and the impact of any addiction on social life and well-being generally. But what about its effects on the rest of human life? Again, porn is the new smoking—and what smoking does to your lungs, porn does to your brain. How could that not affect everything we do?
How does that work? Remember, compulsive porn use causes the release of the substance DeltaFosB, whose job is to rewire our brains. This is how over time, addiction doesn’t just make someone crave more and more of something, but also insidiously turns him into a different person.
Perhaps the most striking and far-reaching discovery in neuroscience over the past 20 years has been the idea of neuroplasticity. Scientists used to think of the brain as a kind of machine, like an extremely intricate clock or circuit board, whose structure is basically settled once and for all, at birth or at some time in early childhood.
It turns out that our brain is much more complex and organic. It is constantly changing, constantly rewiring itself, constantly transforming. The various functions of our brains are performed by neural pathways, and the analogy is that they are like muscles. Aristotle was right—you are what you repeatedly do. That is largely good news, but there is one downside: neuroplasticity is a competitive process. When you “work out” one part of your brain intensely, it will essentially steal resources from nearby areas of the brain to “pump itself up” if these are left dormant.
It’s easy enough to see how that works out when someone suffers from addiction. Every time you light up, or shoot up, or watch porn, that is like an intense “workout” for one set of neural “muscles”—which drains resources away from the rest of the brain.
Specifically, the release of DeltaFosB that comes with porn use weakens our prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is everything the rat brain is not; it is because humans have a big prefrontal cortex that we have civilization. This is the thinking part of the brain, which calculates risk, controls impulses, allows us to project ourselves into the future and therefore plan, and handles abstract and rational thinking. In terms of Plato’s famous chariot allegory, which describes reason as a charioteer whose job is to lead the two unruly horses, Thymoides, our temperament, and Epithymetikon, our base instincts, the prefrontal cortex is the charioteer.
Neuroimaging studies have shown that addicts develop “hypofrontality,” the technical term for an impaired prefrontal cortex. People with hypofrontality exhibit lower amounts of gray matter, abnormal white matter, and a reduced ability to process glucose (which is the brain’s fuel) in the prefrontal cortex.
Hypofrontality manifests in a decline in what psychologists call executive function. As the name executive function suggests, this is a pretty important feature of our minds. Executive function includes our decision-making faculties, our ability to control impulses, to evaluate risk, reward, and danger. Yes, just that. Scientists don’t fully understand how addiction causes hypofrontality, but it makes intuitive sense that the two should be linked. Addiction is such a bane because even as our urges for the next hit get stronger, our capacity to control urges weakens. The horses get carried away even as the charioteer’s arms go weak.
I have found close to 150 brain studies that find evidence of hypofrontality in internet addicts—which, it’s safe to assume, is nearly synonymous with internet porn addicts, at least for males—and more than a dozen that have found signs of hypofrontality in sex addicts or porn users.
That’s right: porn addiction literally atrophies the most important part of our brain.
A 2016 study split current porn users into two groups: one group who abstained from their favorite food for three weeks, and one group who abstained from porn for three weeks. At the end of the three weeks, porn users were less able to delay gratification. Because this is a study with a randomly-assigned control group, it’s solid evidence for a causal link (rather than just a correlation) between porn use and lower self-control.
Here are some other cognitive problems that scientific studies have linked to porn use: decreased academic performance, decreased working memory performance, decreased decision-making ability, higher impulsivity and lower emotion regulation, higher risk aversion, lower altruism, higher rates of neurosis. These are all symptoms related to hypofrontality.
Other studies have found links between porn and high stress, social anxiety, romantic attachment anxiety and avoidance, narcissism, depression, anxiety, aggressiveness, and poor self-esteem. These aren’t direct symptoms of hypofrontality, but it’s easy to see how someone with impaired executive function would be at greater risk of developing any number of those pathologies. The studies generally find that the more porn use, the greater these problems.
So neuroplasticity means that porn addiction, by strengthening certain neural pathways in the brain, weakens others, especially those related to executive function.
But there’s another alarming implication for what neuroplasticity means for porn addiction: while we now know that, at any age, the brain is much more plastic than we previously thought, there is still no doubt that, all else being equal, the younger we are the more plastic our brains. You can learn, say, a foreign language or a musical instrument at any age, but there is a level of skill that you will only ever achieve if you start young. Our brains are always plastic, but they are still much more plastic when we are young. Furthermore, when certain pathways are solidified at a young age, they tend to stay that way, because while it is still possible to change them later on in life, it is much harder.
The Impact of Porn on the Child Brain
This brings us to another enormous taboo related to porn: say whatever you will about adults consuming it, in theory we all agree that children shouldn’t be exposed to it—yet in reality, we all know just as well that they are. In prodigious amounts. Just as we know that the porn sites do absolutely nothing to prevent kids from consuming it.
The statistics are terrifying. According to a 2013 Spanish study, “63 percent of boys and 30 percent of girls were exposed to online pornography during adolescence,” including “bondage, child pornography, and rape.” According to the British Journal of School Nursing, “children under 10 now account for 22 percent of online porn consumption under 18.”
A 2019 literature review found the following negative effects, drawing from more than 20 studies: “regressive attitudes towards women,” “sexual aggression,” “social maladjustment,” “sexual preoccupation,” and “compulsivity.” One study found “an increase in incidents of peer sex abuse among children and that the perpetrator commonly had been exposed to pornography in many of these incidents.” The review also found that “studies of girls’ exposure to pornography as children suggest that it has an impact on their constructs of self.” Among other negative effects, studies of teens more specifically found a “relationship between pornography exposure and . . . social isolation, misconduct, depression, suicidal ideation, and academic disengagement.”
Furthermore, “children of both sexes who are exposed to pornography are more likely to believe that the acts they see, such as anal sex and group sex, are typical among their peers.”
It’s harder to show a direct causal link scientifically, but it still stands to reason that there should be a link between the porn explosion and the widely documented explosion in mental health problems among teenagers.
While the causes of what’s been called a mental health crisis among teenagers are hotly disputed, the actual facts are not: according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, an official government survey which looks at a very broad cross-section of Americans—over 600,000— “from 2009 to 2017, major depression among 20- to 21-year-olds more than doubled, rising from 7 percent to 15 percent. Depression surged 69 percent among 16- to 17-year-olds. Serious psychological distress, which includes feelings of anxiety and hopelessness, jumped 71 percent among 18- to 25-year-olds from 2008 to 2017. Twice as many 22- to 23-year-olds attempted suicide in 2017 compared with 2008, and 55 percent more had suicidal thoughts,” writes San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge.
So the teenage mental health crisis began around 2009, right after smartphones and Tube sites changed the nature of porn. Again, not scientific proof of a causal link, but certainly suggestive.
The bottom line is this: given what we know porn does to the brain, and given that we know that the younger the brain the more plastic it is, it is a near certainty that whatever porn addiction does to adults, it’s going to do to minors—except much worse. This is something we must conclude simply from knowing about the basic facts of human neurobiology, even without taking into account any negative psychological effects of exposure of children to hardcore pornography.
Might Porn Cause Societal Collapse?
I have tried to be as careful as possible and only to lay out carefully-drawn scientific arguments. We can, and should, debate morality, but we should be clear about facts. And in a world where a million articles claim everything and its opposite on the basis of some “study,” I wanted to be as precise as possible about what we can know scientifically about porn, with a high degree of certainty, versus things we can strongly suspect, albeit not prove.
We know what porn does to the brain, because the medical science is solid. Because social science is much softer, we can’t know for certain what causal impacts porn has on society, if any. But once we realize that we have to be much more humble in this area, we can still make prudential judgments.
Remember the sex recession? It seems that Japan is a precursor in all kinds of recession: just as it went first into the zero interest rate economic environment that the rest of the rich world has been experiencing since 2008, and which looks more like a new permanent state with each passing day, Japan also entered its sex recession a decade before us. Japan also got broadband internet earlier than the rest of the world. Could it be that Japan is an example of what’s likely to happen to us if we don’t do something about porn addiction?
Since Japan got broadband internet, the younger generations have gone through significant social changes. “In 2005, a third of Japanese single people ages 18 to 34 were virgins; by 2015, 43 percent of people in this age group were, and the share who said they did not intend to get married had risen, too. (Not that marriage was any guarantee of sexual frequency: A related survey found that 47 percent of married people hadn’t had sex in at least a month.),” The Atlantic’s Kate Julian wrote in her article on the sex recession.
In Japan, this new generation of sexless men—and the Japanese sex recession is caused by men’s lack of interest, to the vocal dismay of young Japanese women, if media reports are to be trusted—are known as soushoku danshi, literally “grass-eating men”—in a word, herbivores. The epithet was originally coined by a frustrated female columnist but, incredibly, the herbivores aren’t offended and most of them are happy to identify as such.
Given Japan’s population decline, the herbivores, who have become a massive subculture, are a subject of national debate in Japan, Slate’s Alexandra Harney reports. And what seems to define the herbivores is not just that they have no interest in sex, it’s that they don’t seem to be interested in much of anything at all.
They tend to live with their parents. After all, it’s hard to find a place to live when you don’t have a steady job, which herbivores say they don’t look for, because they’re not interested in a professional career. Not that they’re opting out of productive society to focus on, say, art, or activism, or some other form of creativity or counter-culture. Apparently, one of the few hobbies that seem to be popular among herbivores is . . . going on walks. To be fair, walking is an important part of digestion for ruminants.
What herbivores do seem to be interested in is spending the vast majority of their time alone, on the internet. Herbivores who have a social life keep it restricted to a small circle of friends. While the Japanese used to be notorious for their national obsession with tourism, they don’t like to travel abroad. They have created a new market for yaoi, a Japanese genre of bodice ripper-style romance portraying homoerotic relationships between men; while yaoi’s audience has traditionally been female, the male herbivores like yaoi.
Countless explanations are proffered for the herbivore phenomenon, from cultural to economic, and it makes intuitive sense that some of those factors would be at play. Nevertheless, I find it striking that everything we know about the herbivores matches with what we know about online porn addiction, in particular reduced libido and overuse of the internet. We also know that Japan has growing markets for sex toys for men, but not for women, as well as for extreme and homoerotic pornography, which is consistent with a population that’s been desensitized to normal sex stimulus by online porn addiction.
Beyond sexuality, the herbivores seem strikingly like a generation of men suffering from hypofrontality, the neurological disease caused by porn addiction. It seems that their key problem is an inability to commit, whether to a career or a woman. Commitment requires abilities enabled by the prefrontal cortex, like self-mastery, correctly weighing risk and reward, and projecting oneself into the future. Becoming financially independent, visiting a foreign country, moving out of your parents’ apartment, going to parties, meeting new people, asking a girl out—what all these things have in common is that while young men generally want to do them, they can also be intimidating; and it is the executive function of the brain located in the prefrontal cortex that makes it possible to get over the hump of initial reluctance that comes from the lower parts of the brain.
With Japan on the road to self-extinction in part as a result of its males’ lack of interest in sex or marriage, it’s hard not to think of Nietzsche’s parable of the Last Man, his nightmare scenario for the fate that would await Western civilization after the Death of God if it did not embrace the way of the Übermensch: the last man lives a life of comfort, has all his appetites satisfied, embraces conformity and rejects conflict, and seeks nothing more, incapable as he is of imagination, or initiative, or creativity, or originality, or risk-taking. The Last Man, in short, is man returned to something like an animal state, though not that of a carnivore. Nietzsche compares him to an insect, but herbivore fits quite well. In Nietzsche’s terrifying phrase, the Last Man believes he has discovered happiness.
Again, it’s impossible to prove scientifically that the herbivore phenomenon is caused by widespread porn addiction. But one thing is certainly very suggestive: there’s no explanation for why, if the herbivore trend is caused by some broader cultural or socioeconomic trends, it should be such an overwhelmingly male phenomenon. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Is Japan a harbinger of the future? Are we on the road to becoming a herbivore civilization? Or, to take another analogy, becoming like the helpless people on the spaceship in “WALL-E,” except we never got around to actually creating the AI and robots that enabled their pointless, ghastly lives of fake pleasure?
Perhaps it sounds hyperbolic. But what we do know is that large numbers of our civilization are hooked on a drug that has profound effects on the brain, which we mostly don’t understand, except that everything we understand is negative and alarming. And we are just ten years into the process. If we don’t act, pretty soon the next generation will be a generation that largely got hooked on this brain-eating drug as children, whose brains are uniquely vulnerable. It seems perfectly reasonable and consistent with the evidence as we have it to be deeply alarmed. Indeed, what seems supremely irrational is our bizarre complacency about something which, at some level, we all know to be happening.
A Massive Experiment On Our Brains
Another way to approach the question of how to respond is to note that we—the entire advanced world, and soon the whole world, as the prices of smartphones and broadband in developing countries keep dropping—are running a massive, unprecedented experiment on our own brains. Scientists do understand a few things about the brain, but only a few. The human brain is by far the most complex thing in the known Universe, and we are subjecting half of the human population at best, to an unprecedented kind of drug.
As I write this, the FDA is reportedly considering a complete ban on e-cigarettes. Imagine if, say, a popular health supplement was shown to, oh, increase the rate of ED among young men by some percentage, let alone several orders of magnitude, or be as addictive as cocaine in large segments of the population. Surely some spotlight-hogging prosecutor would have the company’s owners doing a nationally-televised perp walk before you could say “Four Loko”—unless, of course, he was himself getting high on the stuff and was too ashamed to take a public stand.
An analogy might be in order here: climate change. There are some things we know scientifically to be true: we know that greenhouse gases lead to higher temperatures all else equal; we know that humans are emitting more and more greenhouse gases; we know that temperatures are increasing; we know that greenhouse gases are increasing to unprecedented levels.
We don’t know, scientifically, precisely, what that means for the future. Earth is much too complex an organism for us to be able to predict with high confidence what climate change will mean, specifically—indeed, the best justification for alarm is precisely the fact that we are in uncharted territory when it comes to levels of greenhouse gases and temperatures. This is why the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which represents the scientific consensus on climate change, provides not predictions of the future impact of climate change, but probability distributions (read them if you don’t believe me).
On the basis of the current state of science, we have a preponderance of evidence leading to a rationally justified belief that never-before-seen levels of greenhouse gases and temperature increases create an unacceptable level of risk of negative outcomes, including catastrophic outcomes, so that some kind of collective action (putting aside angry debates on what kind of action) is justified to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The Earth is much too complex for us to understand it completely, and this is actually the best argument for why it’s reckless to pump it full of chemicals at unprecedented levels. After all, we don’t have an Earth 2. (And yes, paradoxically given conservatives’ reluctance to embrace ambitious action on climate change, this is an inherently conservative argument.)
You can see where I’m going: however precious Earth is, so are our brains; however complex Earth is, so much so are our brains, which are the most complex artifacts in the known universe. I don’t see why the same logic doesn’t apply.
The stakes are comparably high, the logic for action is the same, and yet these respective causes get wildly divergent levels of public attention and political capital.
It took a long time between the moment when the evidence for smoking’s link to lung cancer and a whole host of negative health outcomes became incontrovertible. And it took a long time between that moment and when we as a society accepted that evidence and decided to act. This was in part due to legitimate scientific questions early on, in part due to the influence of greedy, monied interests, and in part because of misguided pseudo-libertarian rhetoric. But also in part because so many people were reluctant to admit that their beloved, pleasurable habit, was in reality a destructive addiction—and they were all the more reluctant to admit it because they knew, deep down, that it was the truth.
I still smoke. But, at least, I have stopped lying to myself about why I do it. It’s time we as a society stopped lying to ourselves about what has become the biggest threat to public health.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His writing has appeared in numerous publications. He is based in Paris.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi responded to questions and concerns about the construct of a heavily partisan impeachment process and her refusal to send the articles of impeachment to the Senate.
Highlighting the tenuous nature of the position now held by her party, a barely coherent Speaker Pelosi attempts to explain. As reporters ask questions, Pelosi becomes frustrated and tells the compliant media no more questions on impeachment will be entertained.
A day after impeaching the President, the Speaker of the House refuses to answer questions. [Video prompted to presser portion at 11:50 – watch until 14:00]
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As noted by Jay Sekulow, the House portion of the impeachment effort is finished. The constitution does not outline rules, managers, and delivery methods. Once the House votes to impeach, they are finished. The Senate has full control now.
The Senate can begin their trial phase at any time and call for presentation of articles by the House. If no-one shows up, case dismissed. Pelosi/House has no role in next phase.
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ABYSSUS ABYSSUM INVOCAT / DEEP CALLS TO DEEP 
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