This 'right' for gays is an injustice to children

By Roger Scruton 28 January 2007 • 12:01am

Western societies have, in recent decades, undergone a radical change in their attitudes to
homosexuality. What was once regarded as an intolerable vice is now regarded as an
"orientation", no different in kind, though different in direction, from the inclinations that lead
men to unite with women, and children to be born. This radical change began with the
decriminalisation of homosexual conduct, and with a growing readiness not just to tolerate
homosexuality in private, but to talk about it in public. We saw the emergence of the "public
homosexual", the flamboyant propagandist for that "other" way of life who, like Quentin Crisp,
tried to persuade us that "gay" is after all the right description. There followed the movement for
"gay pride" and the "coming out" of public figures —to the point where it is no longer very
interesting to know whether someone is or is not of the other persuasion. For the most part, the
people of this country have gone along with the changes. They may not be comfortable with its
more demonstrative expressions, but they are prepared to tolerate the homosexual way of life,
provided it keeps within the bounds of decency, and does no violence to fundamental norms.
However, this attitude does not satisfy the activists. For to tolerate is to disapprove. It is only
when conduct offends you that you need to exercise your toleration, and the activists want people
to treat homosexuality as normal. Through the slippery notions of discrimination and human
rights, they have used the law to advance their agenda. Homosexuality is now treated by the law
as a tendency comparable in almost every way to heterosexuality, so that any attempt to
distinguish between people on grounds of their "orientation" — whether as applicants for a job,
or as recipients of a privilege — is regarded as unjust "discrimination", comparable in its moral
heinousness to discrimination on grounds of race or sex. On the whole we have accepted that
laws against discrimination might be needed, in order to protect those who have suffered in the
past from hostile prejudice. Every now and then, however, we wake up to the fact that, although
homosexuality has been normalised, it is not normal. Our acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle,
of same-sex couples, and of the gay scene has not eliminated our sense that these are alternatives
to something, and that it is the other thing that is normal. This other thing is not heterosexual
desire, conceived as an "orientation". It is heterosexual union: the joining of man and woman, in
an act which leads in the natural course of things not just to mutual commitment but to the
bearing of children, the raising of a family and the self-sacrificing habits on which, when all is
said and done, the future of society depends. The propaganda that has tried to rewrite
heterosexuality as an "orientation" is really an attempt to persuade us to overlook the real truth
about sexual union, which is that it is, in its normal form, the way in which one generation gives
way to the next. This truth is recognised by all the great religions, and is endorsed in the
Christian view of marriage as a union created by God. This explains, to a great extent, the
reluctance of religious people to endorse gay marriage, which they see as an attempt to rewrite in
merely human terms the eternal contract of society. To put it in another way, they see gay
marriage as the desecration of a sacrament. Hence the growing conflict between the gay agenda
and traditional religion, of which the current dispute over "adoption rights" is the latest sign.
According to the Christian perspective — and it is one that is shared, I believe, by Muslims and
Jews – adoption means receiving a child as a member of the family, as one to whom you are
committed in the way that a father and mother are committed to children of their own. It is an act
of sacrifice, performed for the benefit of the child, and with a view to providing that child with
the normal comforts of home. Its purpose is not to gratify the parents, but to foster the child, by
making him part of a family. For religious people that means providing the child with a father
and a mother. Anything else would be an injustice to the child and an abuse of his innocence.
Hence there are no such things as "adoption rights". Adoption is the assumption of a duty, and
the only rights involved are the rights of the child. Against that argument the appeal to "anti-
discrimination" laws is surely irrelevant. The purpose of adoption is not to gratify the foster
parents but to help the child. And since, on the religious view, the only help that can be offered is
the provision of a real family, it is no more an act of discrimination to exclude gay couples than
it is to exclude incestuous liaisons or communes of promiscuous "swingers". Indeed, the
implication that adoption is entirely a matter of the "rights" of the prospective parents shows the
moral inversion that is infecting modern society. Instead of regarding the family as the present
generation's way of sacrificing itself for the next, we are being asked to create families in which
the next generation is sacrificed for the pleasure of the present one. We are being asked to
overlook all that we know about the fragility of homosexual partnerships, about the
psychological needs of children, and about the norms that still prevail in our schools and
communities, for the sake of an ideological fantasy. To oppose homosexual adoption is not to
believe that homosexuals should have no dealings with children. From Plato to Britten,
homosexuals have distinguished themselves as teachers, often sublimating their erotic feelings as
those two great men did, through nurturing the minds and souls of the young. But it was Plato
who, in The Laws, pointed out that homosexuals, like heterosexuals, must learn the way of
sacrifice, that it is not present desires that should govern them, but the long-term interests of the
community. And it is surely not implausible to think that those long-term interests are more
likely to be protected by religion than by the political ideologies that govern the Labour Party.

Marriage equality or the destruction of difference?

Roger Scruton and Phillip Blond

When David Cameron announced his support for same sex marriage during his keynote speech at
the 2011 Conservative Party conference, his endorsement stemmed from an understanding of
marriage as a means for commitment and social stability: "I don't support gay marriage in spite
of being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I am a Conservative." The
Government's consequent consultation has now led to the drafting of a Bill currently proceeding
through Parliament.This debate has created many divides across and between religious, civil and
advocacy groups - the most unpleasant of which is the demonising of those who question the
merits of same sex union as if it were self-evidently homophobic to have reservations about the
current proposals. But throughout all of the debate, recognition of the value and worth of
marriage has been assumed rather than discussed. Those who advocate the extension of marriage
to same sex couples have been very strong on the value of equality but almost silent on the
nature of marriage they want equal access to. Whereas those who defend marriage as it is
currently defined seem unable to say exactly what its value and worth is and why the institution
would suffer from extension to same sex couples. A meaningful discussion about the value and
purpose of the institution of marriage itself has not taken place. So, beyond the specifics of the
Government's proposals, we here want to ask: What is marriage, and why does it matter?

Competing visions: Conjugal marriage versus mere partnership

Put simply, there are two competing ideas of marriage at play in the current debate. The first is
traditional and conjugal and extends beyond the individuals who marry to the children they hope
to create and the society they wish to shape. The second is more privative and is to do with a
relationship abstracted from the wider concern that marriage originally was designed to speak to.
Some call this pure partnership or mere cohabitation. The latter view is what marriage is
becoming: a dissolvable contract between two individuals who partner purely for the sake of the
partnership itself. It has little or nothing to do with children, general education or social stability.
This is not to say that it is to be wholly resisted - of course not - but it should be incorporated and
built up to a conjugal summit, because the loss to society of the conjugal model imposes such
high costs on society and the state that neither can be indifferent about its erosion. The
partnership model is one shared by many heterosexuals and wider society, and it is this that has
done much harm to the institution of marriage. By the same token, many homosexuals actually
fulfil a more conjugal model and it is to be hoped that the civil unions we propose speaks to this
and offer same sex couples their own proper version of "conjugal marriage." Marriage in this
conjugal view is a sexual union of husband and wife who promised each other sexual fidelity,
mutual caretaking and the joint parenting of any children they may have. Conjugal marriage is
fundamentally child-centred and female advancing. Lone motherhood, which is bad for both the
woman and the child, is the evident manifestation of the contemporary separation of marriage
and parenthood. This second and newer vision has been fuelled by a new discipline called "close
relationship theory." For close relationship theorists, marriage is simply one kind of close
personal relationship. The structures of the discipline tend to strip marriage of the features that
reflect its importance as a social institution. Marriage is examined primarily as a relationship
created by the couple for the fulfilment of the two individuals who enter into it. But a "close
relationships" culture fails to acknowledge fundamental facets of human life: the fact of sexual
difference; the enormous tide of heterosexual desire in human life; the procreativity of male-
female bonding; the unique social ecology of parenting which offers children vital and
fundamental bonds with their biological parents; and the rich genealogical nature of family ties
and the web of intergenerational supports for family members that they provide. Union across
sexual difference is the most powerful aspect of conjugal marriage. It provides the sole
institution that can successfully cope with the generative power of opposite-sex unions. Conjugal
marriage has several strengths which partnership marriage does not. It is inherently normative,
which is fundamentally good, for it stabilises and secures people in their most profound
relationships. Conjugal marriage cannot celebrate an infinite array of sexual or intimate choices
as equally desirable or valid. Instead, its very purpose lies in channelling the erotic and
interpersonal impulses between men and women in a particular direction: one in which men and
women commit to each other and to the children that their sexual unions commonly (and even at
times unexpectedly) produce. A political indifference to this normativity reflects a culture that
chooses to "do nothing" about sexual attraction between men and women. The outcome of which
is a passive, unregulated heterosexual reality and multiple failed relationships and millions of
fatherless children. Not every married couple has or wants children. But at its core marriage has
always had something to do with societies' recognition of the fundamental importance of the
sexual ecology of human life: humanity is male and female, men and women often have sex,
babies often result, and those babies, on average, do better when their mother and father
cooperate in their care. Conjugal marriage attempts to sustain enduring bonds between women
and men in order to give a baby its mother and father, to bond them to one another and to the
child they have created. If human beings did not reproduce sexually, creating human infants with
their long period of dependency and need, marriage would not be the virtually universal human
social institution that it is.

What is marriage?

In all observed societies some form of marriage exists, as the means whereby the work of one
generation is dedicated to the well-being of the next. Marriage does not merely protect and
nurture children; it is a shield against sexual jealousy, and a unique form of social and economic
co-operation, with a mutually supportive division of roles that more than doubles the
effectiveness of each partner in their shared bid for a future. Marriage fulfils this complex
function because it is something more than a contract of mutual co-operation, and something
more than an agreement to live together. Hence marriage enjoys - or has until recently enjoyed -
a distinct social aura. As anthropologists have observed, weddings are everywhere conceived as
rites of passage, in which a couple pass from one social condition to another. The ceremony is
not the concern of the couple only, but of the entire community that includes them. For this is the
way that children are made - made, that is, as new members of society, who will, in their turn,
take on the task of social reproduction. Society thus has a profound interest in marriage, and
changes to that institution may alter not merely relations among the living, but also the
expectations of those unborn and the legacy of those who predecease them. How marriage is
conceived therefore concerns the whole community, and this is as true of us - whose community
is defined by nationhood, and whose laws are prescribed by Parliament - as it is true of tribes
who define themselves by kinship and who receive their laws from their gods. Ancient societies
were dependent in myriad ways on slavery, and women were often kept in sexual servitude to the
men who had captured or purchased them. But already in Homer we encounter quite another
relation between man and woman, for which the word gamos, marriage, is reserved. In the Greek
marriage the woman was a free partner in a monogamous and in principle lifelong relation,
which had the oikos or household as its goal, and that household was not some domestic
confinement but the site and foundation of social and economic activity. In this sense marriage in
principle was freedom from pure servitude, enshrining as it did distinct roles and responsibilities
in the care of children and the constitution of the family. The definition and maintenance of this
institution was from the earliest times a concern of the polis, the city state, and although the gods
took an interest in marriages, as they took an interest in just about everything, the institution was
regarded as of human rather than divine provenance. The Romans adopted a similar conception,
and placed the monogamous marriage at the heart of their legal and political order, conferring on
it the name - matrimonium - that recognised the centrality of motherhood in the social order. The
origin of the institution was undoubtedly religious, and involved the worship of ancestors and the
sanctity of the hearth. But it was incorporated into the civil law so as to acquire a purely secular
definition, because it had so many self-evident secular benefits. In due course the Roman civil
marriage was Christianised, to become one of seven sacraments recognised by the medieval
Church. And although Protestants reject the belief in marriage as a sacrament, the Anglican
Church retains the expression "Holy Matrimony" in which the historical experience of Western
civilisation is perpetuated.

This historical experience can be summarised in three propositions:

 marriage is an enduring partnership between one man and one woman;

 it is founded in love between the partners and love for the children of their union;
 it is not a contract for services, but an existential choice - a change from one mode of
being to another.

This change of status has the benefit of social recognition, but it comes at a price. And the price
has been, in traditional Christian societies, a heavy one: sexual fidelity "till death do us part," and
a responsibility for the socialising and educating of the children. As people become more and
more reluctant to pay that price, so do weddings become more and more provisional, and the
distinction between the socially endorsed union and the merely private arrangement becomes less
and less absolute and less and less secure. As sociologists are beginning to observe, however,
this gain in freedom for one generation implies a loss for the next. Children born within a
marriage are far more likely to be socialised, outgoing and able to form permanent relationships
of their own, than children born out of wedlock. For their parents have made a commitment in
which the children are included, and of which society approves. This fact is part of the deep
phenomenology of the marital home. Children of married parents find a place in society already
prepared for them, furnished by a regime of parental sacrifice and protected by social norms.
Take away marriage and you expose children to the risk of coming into the world as strangers,
untutored by fathers or abandoned by mothers, a condition of effective abandonment in which
they may remain for the rest of their lives. This is no religious appeal to an institution that is only
favoured by the quaint or unduly nostalgic. Marriage was made part of the secular settlement
because of the self-evident and manifest benefits it conveyed. By almost every measure, we now
know that marriage confers significant if not life changing advantages on children born under its
auspices. We know that outcomes for children of divorce and one parent families are
significantly worse in term of mental and physical heath. We know that children born outside of
traditional structures suffer significant economic and social harm and that this harm extends
throughout their education to future relationships and the stability and success that they can
confer on their own families and children. So strong is the original bond from which the children
originate that remarriage does not correct the dysfunction that comes from its loss.

The secular unmaking of marriage

An anthropologist will hardly be surprised to discover that marriage is regarded, in most simple
societies, as a religious event. Rites of passage are conducted in the presence of the ancestors,
and the ancestors are presided over by the gods. Religion is one way in which the long-term
interests of society may animate the short-term decisions of its present members. It is therefore
natural that marriage should be seen from within as something divinely ordained, with a sacred
aura that reinforces the undertaken duties and elicits the support of the tribe. You do not have to
be a religious believer to observe this or to see its point. You need only be aware of what is at
stake when people bring children into the world and claim those children as their own. Hence,
although marriage was a civil institution in Roman law, it was embellished with religious
trappings and the household gods were fully part of it.

When, at the Reformation, the idea of marriage as a sacrament was discarded, the Protestant
churches retained the power to "consecrate" the unions of their members. It was probably not
until the French Revolution that the State declared itself to be the true broker and undoer of
marriages, though neither the Catholic nor the Protestant church has ever accepted this as
doctrine or afforded its comforts to those who view their marriages as purely civil affairs.

Since then, however, we have experienced a steady de-sacralisation of the marriage tie. It is not
merely that marriage is governed now by a secular law - that has been the case since Antiquity. It
is that this law is constantly amended, not in order to perpetuate the idea of an existential
commitment, but on the contrary to make it possible for commitments to be evaded, and
agreements rescinded, by rewriting them as the terms of a contract. What was once a socially
endorsed change of status has become a private and reversible deal. The social constraints that
tied man and wife to each other through all troubles and disharmonies have been one by one
removed, to the point where marriage is in many communities hardly distinct from a short-term
agreement for cohabitation. This has been made more or less explicit in the American case by the
pre-nuptial agreement, which specifies a division of property in the event of divorce. Partners
now enter the marriage with an escape route already mapped out. This should not surprise us.
When the Government usurped the rite of matrimony, and reshaped what had once been holy
law, it was inevitable that it should loosen the marital tie. For the Government does not represent
the Eternal, nor does it have so much regard for future generations that it can disregard the
whims of the merely living. The Government is always and inevitably the instrument of its
current members; it will respond to their pressures and try to satisfy their demands. It has
therefore found it expedient to undo the sacrament, to permit easy divorce, to reduce marriage
from a vow to a contract and - in the latest projected act of liberalisation - to permit marriage
between people of the same sex. None of this has been done with evil motives, and always there
has been, in the back of people's minds, a memory of the sacred and existential ties that
distinguish people from animals and enduring societies from madding crowds. The desire has
been to retain the distinctiveness of marriage, as the best that we can hope for by way of a lasting
commitment, while escaping from its more onerous demands - demands that many people are no
longer prepared to recognise. As a result, marriage has ceased to be a rite of passage into another
and higher life, and has instead become a bureaucratic stamp with which to endorse our
temporary choices. We would not call this a gain in freedom - for those choices have not in
recent years been denied to us, and by dignifying them with the name "marriage" we merely
place another obstacle before the option to which humanity has devoted so much of its idealising
fervour. Of course, we are still free to dedicate our lives to each other, to our home and to our
children. But this act is rendered the more difficult the less society recognises the uniqueness, the
value and the sacrificial character of what we do. Just as people are less disposed to assume the
burdens of high office when society withholds the dignities and privileges that those offices have
previously signified, so too are they less disposed to enter real marriages, when society
acknowledges no distinction between marriages that deserve the name and relationships that
merely borrow the title.
Corrupting equality

Lacking religion or a more communal understanding, people no longer live by unbreakable ties.
Vows become contracts and long-term commitments become temporary deals. We may regret
this, but we cannot alter it; still less can the State impose a discipline that conflicts with it.
Having assumed the right to solemnise marriages and to endow them with legal status, the State
must then follow the desires and inclinations of its current citizens, and redefine the institution
accordingly. If marriage is without religious overtones or sacrificial demands, then many people
will begin to believe that it is no more than a prejudice to think that marriage is to be conceived
in traditional terms, as the relation of matrimony, devoted to motherhood and child-raising. If
two people of the same sex wished to be joined by marriage, and if the definition of marriage lies
entirely with the State, why should the institution not be amended in order to accommodate
them? Is not this simply the next step in a natural process of decay which, viewed from another
perspective, is also a process of growth - the growth of a new institution, and one more suited to
our times? Are we not merely witnessing the latest manifestation of the transition (commented
upon a century and a half ago by Sir Henry Maine) from status to contract? And in a secular,
liberal democracy, it is contract not status that counts.

Underlying that argument is a conception of equality that is having an ever-increasing influence

over legal reasoning and social practices in our time, and that is undermining and destroying
every institution that human beings have erected in order to defend and perpetuate difference.
Equality no longer means - as it ought to mean - the equal opportunity to participate in the
benefits of society. Instead, it means the removal of all forms of social difference, all the ways in
which people have tried to define and maintain institutions and paths through life that require
something more than mere humanity of their members. Already, all our institutions and all
employment contracts must conform to principles of "non-discrimination," providing open-ended
lists of the differences between people that must be discounted if the law is to permit things to
continue. The idea of an institution whose benefit depends precisely on emphasizing sexual
difference begins to look like an offence against the first principles of social order. However, the
argument from "non-discrimination" is deeply flawed. For it assumes that the institution of
marriage has been only accidentally connected to its social function - the function of passing on
social capital from one generation to the next. It assumes that an institution, in which absent
generations are essentially involved, can be endlessly amended for the sake of the living and
without reference to the unborn and the dead (to use the terms bequeathed to us by Burke). To
put it another way: marriage is an arrangement whose beneficiaries, in the normal case, exist
only after it and because of it. If people have accepted the idea of civil marriage, it is because
they have accepted that the State is both competent and willing to uphold the matrimonial ideal.
The State was accepted as competent to grant and administer marriages because it endorsed the
principle that marriage exists for the sake of motherhood and all that motherhood means. But an
institution that exists to protect motherhood discriminates against half of mankind. Nor is that the
only function of traditional marriage, which was not only a way of endorsing and guaranteeing
the raising of children, but also a dramatisation of sexual difference. Marriage kept the sexes at
such a distance from each other that their coming together became an existential leap rather than
a passing experiment. Sexual attraction was shaped by this, and even if the shaping was - at some
deep level - a cultural and not a human universal, it made desire into a kind of tribute paid to the
other sex. Marriage has grown around the idea of sexual difference and all that sexual difference
means. To make this feature accidental rather than essential is to change marriage beyond
recognition. Gay people want marriage because they want quite rightly a variant of the social
endorsement that it signifies; but by admitting gay marriage we deprive marriage of its social
meaning. It ceases to be what it has been hitherto - namely, a union of the sexes and a blessing
conferred by the living on the unborn. The pressure for gay marriage is therefore in a certain
measure self-defeating. It resembles Henry VIII's move to gain ecclesiastical endorsement for his
divorce by making himself head of the Church. The Church that endorsed his divorce thereby
ceased to be the Church whose endorsement he was seeking. Past societies have tended to
amplify sexual difference, not only through clothing, role-playing and the separation of public
and private spheres, but also through activities like dancing which place sexual difference on
display. Our society has begun to treat men and women as equal and exchangeable in virtually
all the roles that they occupy, and to condone styles of dress and conduct which make no
distinction between the male and the female. This too has had an impact on marriage, since it has
diminished the distance between the sexes and made it less obvious than it was - for example, in
Jane Austen's day - that marriage is a threshold, which you cross into territory defined in part by
the opposite sex. This is another reason for the fragility of marriage in the world today. In a
society that refuses to treat sexual difference as the great ontological divide that it was for our
grandparents, it becomes possible to regard the sex of your partner as a minor detail in any
arrangement between you. However, if we believe, on those grounds, that marriage between
people of the same sex involves no deep upheaval in our social consciousness, it is because we
are no longer talking of marriage as commonly or traditionally conceived. We are using the word
to describe something else - a contract of cohabitation representing a partnership shorn of
external reference. One immediate consequence of this is that the laws that exist in order to
protect marriage lose their traditional rationale. Incestuous and bigamous marriages are currently
forbidden, and indeed severely punished - but why should this be so, if marriages are simply
contracts of cohabitation, in which only the partners have an interest? Adultery and non-
consummation are currently grounds for divorce. But why, if the contract makes no reference to
these things? And what, in any case, does non-consummation and adultery amount to? Surely,
the correct response to those observations is to retreat from the claim that the new arrangements
are really marriages, and to recognise that the distinction between matrimony and cohabitation or
conjugal model as opposed to that of pure partnership is an essential distinction. This does not
mean that all marriages must produce children, or that marriages cannot end in divorce. It means
rather that marriage is a special kind of relationship, in which man and woman make a
commitment beyond any contract between them. It means that marriage retains its primary
function, as the means whereby children enter into the world and also inherit the world, receiving
from their parents the social capital that their parents in turn inherited. It means that marriage
retains its fundamental aura, as a display of sexual difference, in which man becomes fully man
and woman fully woman. All those features of marriage, which in our view are essential to its
moral standing as well as its social function, will be jeopardised by the removal of sexual
difference from the foundation of the arrangement. The institution will become a deal between
the partners, rather than a joint entry into an institution whose duties and rewards transcend any
contract between them. This is why matrimony has been described as holy: in entering it you are
passing from one sphere of being to another, a sphere that remains to be discovered, and whose
duties are as yet unknown. And there is another and politically urgent reason for reaffirming that
old idea. Monogamous marriage has been, historically, rare. It is the valuation of this institution
that sets Western civilisation apart, an institution that we inherited from Greece and Rome along
with the polis and the secular law. It was affirmed and incorporated by Christianity, and the
sacramentalisation of marriage in the Middle Ages went hand in hand with the cult of the Virgin
Mary and the idealisation of woman. We may not identify with that great current of ideas and
emotions now, but we are downstream from its benefits. The recognition of women as the equals
of men, the disgust that we feel when women are treated as chattels, the desire that women move
in our society face to face with men, neither veiled nor concealed but competing on equal terms
and entitled to equal respect - all this, it seems to us, is the gift of a history in which
monogamous marriage has been the institution that defined what the sexes are for each other. We
are entering a period in which we are in direct confrontation with cultures that treat women as
chattels, which regard marriage as a form of male domination, and which permit one man to have
up to four wives - in some cases more. We have, in our midst, sub-cultures that endorse the
genital mutilation of girls, which condemn girls to marry whoever has been chosen for them by
others and which do not baulk at "honour killings" when a girl has followed the inclination of her
heart. All those things we regard, and rightly, with abhorrence, and we do so because of that long
history of the matrimonial ideal, which we inherited from Greece and Rome by means of "Holy
Matrimony" and the cult of courtly love. Why should we throw this away at such a critical point
in our history, simply in order to bestow on gay couples a benefit that will not accrue to them
what they truly desire and will be by then no more than a word without a referent?

Why difference matters

The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill now before the British Parliament is part of a trend that
supposes equality is only to be advanced by erasing all differences between us so that we are all
the same and all equal. But a free society is made of those who differ and who can express that
difference and distinction both by themselves and in association with each other. The task of a
democracy is not to obliterate difference in the name of a collective unity that makes all
interchangeable with each - after all, we have seen the fruit of that legacy in China, Russia and
Cambodia. We believe that if the argument for equality has merit, it does so because it protects
difference. Equality used to allow those who differ not to subsume themselves under another's
identity but to claim equity for their distinction and the State's protection in maintaining and even
defending it. Now, however, equality is being used to erase difference, destroy institutional
distinction and remove proper and plural provision for different groups, faiths and organisations.
We have profound reservations about same sex marriage, not just because of the harm it does to
a vital heterosexual institution, but also because we reject the implication that in order to be
equal and respected homosexuals should conform to heterosexual norms and be, in effect, the
same as heterosexuals. In this sense, we believe same sex marriage to be homophobic - it
demands recognition for gay relationships, but at the price of submitting those relationships to
heterosexual definition. This serves neither homosexuals nor heterosexuals. The former are
absorbed into a structure that does not give due credit or recognition to their distinction and
difference; whereas heterosexuals are stripped of any institution that belongs to them by virtue of
their heterosexuality. Men and women who marry are denied proper recognition of their own
distinctive union across the sexes and, even more importantly, any recognition of their role and
unique responsibility in creating and nurturing children whose origin still lies exclusively in
heterosexual union. Same sex couples want marriage because they want the social endorsement
that it signifies; but by admitting gay marriage we deprive marriage of its social meaning. It
ceases to be what it has been hitherto - namely, a union of the different sexes and a blessing
conferred by the living on the unborn. The pressure for gay marriage is therefore in a certain
measure self-defeating: in seeking equality with something unlike yourself, the thing that you
join to is no longer what you joined. What is needed here is equity that respects difference not
equality that destroys it. Gay people have wholly legitimate demands and needs, not just for
acceptance but indeed celebration and recognition - this needs to be recognised by all who
oppose same sex marriage. What is needed is an equity in diversity. To pursue gay equality is
noble and right. But to pursue it by undermining heterosexual institutions is deeply damaging to
both hetero- and homosexual persons alike. For heterosexuals need an institution that shapes
them for the consequences of opposite sex union - without that, it is disaster and despair for
children, burden and poverty for women, and dislocation and atomisation for society.

***

We conclude with two recommendations - the first to the State, and the second to the churches:

 To the State, we recommend that it leaves marriage as it currently is. Conservatives at

least should recognise that not all that currently is, is an evil that should be removed. We
may all be modern, but we are not Maoists. Some traditional structures are traditional
because they serve human interests through time and space. Marriage is one of those
institutions, and it is one that all recognise is under threat. Sex and marriage were
separated in the 1960s, children and marriage in the 1980s, and now we are witnessing
the final separation of parenting from partnering.

Marriage is pro-child and pro-women; it is our social insurance against the rising numbers of
abandoned children, the ongoing rise of lone motherhood and the exculpation of men who no
longer feel or even demand any responsibility for women or the children they bear with them.
Marriage, in principle, is the most friendly of institutions to women, and the disassociation of
marriage from children will further isolate and decouple the needs of women from the needs of
men. It will erode and ultimately destroy the meaning of marriage.
The loss of the conjugal and matrimonial aspect, and the attendant rise of partnering, is the
greatest threat to marriage. The fact that marriage will be redefined such that children and the
creation of new life, along with the responsibility that goes with that, will no longer be part of
what marriage means is perhaps the most un-conservative and un-progressive measure ever
contemplated. If we change the meaning of marriage, it will no longer be marriage.

 To the churches, we recommend that they recognise that the demand for same sex
marriage comes from a serious desire for permanent loving homosexual relationships to
be recognised and embraced by society, by Christianity and by other faith groups. The
demand for secular marriage equality is, in part, an appeal for religious acceptance, which
the Government's proposals cannot offer. We believe the Churches should consider
offering, not civil partnerships, but civil unions to same sex couples - a celebration and a
status that recognises a transition from partnership into permanence. And the churches
and other faith groups should therefore grant civil partnerships a religious celebration and
recognition making them a civil union. Churches should recognise not just that
homosexual persons are as they are, but they also are owed recognition of the permanent
relationships they choose.
Christian accounts of reality include an end and a goal (a teleology) for all creatures and a
perfection for all beings. What, then, is the teleology for a gay life? How should homosexuals
live with their own created nature and live unto God as well? Since gay people clearly fall in
love and form lifelong commitments, should this not be part of Christian teaching and practice
for them also? And while we recognise that Christian discernment is struggling with these issues,
is it not right and proper that permanent and loving homosexual relationships be given Christian
public recognition and celebration? We urge the Church to explore the teleology of same sex
relationships. If there ever is to be proper Christian care of homosexual people, it must craft a
good life for them also - so as to make for them a place of permanent stability and reciprocal
love and genuine recognition.
We say then to the churches: offer more than a civil partnership - offer a civil union celebrated in
Church as a distinctive form of social and theological realisation for gay people that all
Christians would want to see. This really would be a union that would be far more radical than
anything currently on offer, and it would be a step towards social reconciliation of the kind
preached in the Gospels.

Becoming a Family: Marriage is not a contract but a vow

Scruton, 2001.

Igrew to immaturity in the sixties, at the moment famously, and ironically, described by Philip
Larkin:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)—
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Young people of my generation had no time for Larkin's irony and simply dismissed traditional
sexual morality as a clutter of meaningless taboos. The old culture endured among adults,
especially those who had fought in the war and learned firsthand that societies depend on
sacrifice. But the fidelity of our elders to the old mores merely caused our experiments to appear
romantic and sophisticated in our own eyes, marks of a singular freedom of mind. In truth, I
didn't enjoy the spectacle of permissiveness and half suspected that the old morality was right.
Nevertheless, I was not going to miss out on the available freedoms and felt entitled to my share
of thrills. Like many of my generation, therefore, I was reluctant to marry and did so only when I
discovered that my experiment in cohabitation had ceased to be an experiment and had become a
commitment instead. My wife-to-be had been brought up as a Roman Catholic in provincial
France. We had lived together through the antics of May 1968, which impressed both of us with
the destructiveness and stupidity of people when guided by nothing more than a desire for
liberation. Marriage was to bring an end to such childish things and to imbue our life with
discipline. In that spirit, I attended the obligatory lessons with Father Napier of the Brompton
Oratory in London, by way of preparing for the sacramental—and sacrificial—act. The Oratory
retains the permitted vestiges of the Latin mass and as a result has amplified its congregation of
true believers with a reserve army of believers in belief, of which I was one. Next to the
Italianate church, where its priests sing in their gorgeous robes, and a four-part choir responds,
stands an altogether humbler building, the residence of the Oratorians, whose order requires
them not to fast and pray in seclusion but to go out and spread the word, obedient to the vision of
Saint Filippo Neri, their activist founder and high priest of the Counter Reformation. Neri made
the term "propaganda" part of the language, and the thing denoted by it part of life. But the home
of his London followers, established in the last century by the great Cardinal Newman, has a
dull, quotidian atmosphere; it is a place of quiet footsteps and mumbled greetings. Copperplate
engravings of forgotten saints gather dust in corners, and the smell of institutional cooking wafts
down corridors where nothing moves save a shuffling old priest, a fluttering curtain, or an
aproned housemaid too old and stiff to brush the high cobwebs away. In the room set aside for
instruction, Father Napier rehearsed the tenets of the Catholic faith. I assented to them all: not
one of them created the slightest intellectual difficulty, save the major premise of God's
existence. But this too could be held in place, I surmised, by the structure that had been built
upon it, and whose angles and junctures I knew from Saint Thomas Aquinas. A religion without
orthodoxy is destined to be swept away by the first breath of doubt. When the doctrines are all in
place, however, neatly interlocking, expressed and endorsed by ritual, then, I reasoned, none can
be pried free from the edifice and exposed to questioning. The structure stands unshakably, even
though built upon nothing. Seen in this way, religion is a work of art, and its values are aesthetic
values: beauty, wholeness, symmetry, harmony. Clearly, my attitude to the Church whose rituals
I was prepared to borrow was not ultimately the attitude of a believer. Hence, when the marriage
came under strain—which it very soon did, since our years of cohabitation had disenchanted our
first love, while offering no second love in place of it—the religious chains proved to be made of
paper. Divorce appeared at the time in all the attractive colors of an easy option: a bid for
freedom, a way to become what I truly and authentically was. Young people of my generation
were told to seize their chances and to free themselves from guilt. Only too late do you discover
that guilt is not a sickness to be overcome but a punishment to be lived through. The years
following the end of my first marriage were filled with grief, and rightly so. Nobody should be
allowed to get away scot-free from a life's commitment, and no one should treat lightly what is
the most solemn vow. You can hope for forgiveness; but you have no right to expect it.
Nevertheless I learned from the experience. My guilt was a clear proof of the Church's view of
matrimony as an indissoluble tie. This doctrine, which at the time of my marriage had been for
me merely an inert corollary to an abstract system of theology, now hit me in the face as a living
truth about the human condition and a deep explanation of the ruined lives that I saw on every
side, my own and my ex-wife's included. For 20 years, my efforts at romance would fizzle out,
quenched in the inward flow of lamentation. This process, if painful, was also purifying. It rid
me of illusions and in particular of the illusion that sexual love is just an ordinary expression of
our freedom. Often I recalled those quiet corridors of the Oratory and the foretaste they had
offered of the penitential path beyond my marriage. A doctrine that permitted no other course
save abstinence elevated marriage to a higher sphere, idealized it as a kind of redemption. What
Father Napier had offered us through marriage was the very thing the Oratorians enjoyed in their
place of dusty rituals: the transfiguration of everyday life. When I met Sophie, six years ago, I
knew how ridiculous it was for a man of 50 to propose marriage to a girl of 22. But it was as
though I had carried her portrait within me during 20 years of penitence and had suddenly
happened upon her incarnation. We were introduced in the hunting field, constrained by the
meticulous courtesies of which fox hunting is, in England, one of the few remaining preserves—
the real reason our new rulers hate it. If romantic feelings arise in such a context, they come
imbued with courtly hesitation. So it was with us, and it is part of what made us serious.
Although impatient every Saturday for the moment when Sophie would appear, I was nonplused
in her presence, searching in vain for words. Then one day my horse fell, and she stopped to
rescue me, so sacrificing the day's pleasure and giving proof that she cared. We began an old-
fashioned courtship that lasted through many months of restraint. Formality does not freeze
emotion but heightens it. And emotions that take ritual shape lead of their own accord to that
supreme ritual, which is marriage. By amplifying the distance between you, courtship intensifies
the magnetic force when finally you join. Indeed, in our tradition—not necessarily the only or
the best one, but the only one we have—marriage ought to be seen as the culmination of a
process that begins in bashfulness and proceeds by stages to an intimacy both resisted and
desired. I was lucky: not everyone is given a second chance, certainly not a second chance like
this one, in which sympathy sparked across the years, made us welcome the barrier of age and
then work to overcome it. When we awoke to what had happened, we knew that it was too late to
think of any course but marriage, which had grown between us like a plant that had suddenly
burst into flower. Of course it matters what others think, and we, especially, needed their
acceptance. The small-scale, furtive event in the registry office, hastily conducted like an illicit
affair, would not have served our need. On the contrary, it would have seemed an admission that
our spheres and years divided us and that we were making a dreadful mistake. We needed to
make others complicit in our venture, to be bound together not just in private but also in the
public eye. Ceremonies are redemptive. They raise private undertakings into public avowals, and
at the same time make the union of individuals into an emblem of the community's will to
endure. Modern society tends to construe marriage as a kind of contract. This tendency is
familiar to us from the sordid divorces of tycoons and pop stars, and is made explicit in the
"prenuptial agreement," under the terms of which an attractive woman sells her body at an
inflated price, and a man secures his remaining assets from her future predations. Under such an
agreement, marriage becomes a preparation for divorce, a contract between two people for the
short-term exploitation of each other. Surprisingly, it was the great Immanuel Kant who prepared
the world for this view of things, describing marriage, in language of exemplary bleakness, as a
"contract for the reciprocal use of the sexual organs." But then Kant didn't marry, and his heresy
was soon corrected by Hegel, who did. According to Hegel, marriage is a "substantial tie." It
begins in a contract—but it is a contract to transcend contract, by abolishing the separation
between the parties. Hegel's point can be put more simply. Marriage is surrounded by moral,
legal, and religious prohibitions precisely because it is not a contract but a vow. Contracts have
terms and come to an end when the terms are fulfilled or when the parties agree to renounce
them. They bind us to the temporal world and have the transience of human appetite. Vows do
not have terms, nor can they be legitimately broken. They are "forever"; and in making a vow
you are placing yourself outside time and change, in a state of spiritual union, which can be
translated into actions in the here and now but also lies above and beyond the world of decaying
things. That we can make vows is one part of the great miracle of human freedom; and when we
cease to make them, we impoverish our lives by stripping them of lasting commitment. Hence
divorce does not end a real marriage, which will continue to bind those who have drifted away
from it or who have tried to set its vows aside. For 20 years I was constantly aware of that other
person, whom I no longer saw, but whose thoughts, feelings, and reproaches were addressed to
me in my own inner voice. Sophie understood this and accepted it, because she is the child of
divorced parents, who took trouble never to quarrel in her presence and always to speak of each
other with the respect due to a fellow parent. Sophie was the living reminder of their vows and of
the need to give due weight to them, and the marriage remained in a strange way untouchable,
just because it was sacred in the eyes of a child. Thanks to that great reservoir of fudge and
compromise that is the Anglican Church, divorcés can now wed in church—not through a
marriage ceremony but through a "service of dedication," designed to put a holy seal on the
state's scrap of paper. Without presuming on, but nevertheless hoping for, forgiveness, you can
petition the Almighty through this lesser ceremony and thereby summon the support and
endorsement of your community. We married in a registry office and arranged the service of
dedication for the next day, in Sophie's local church. We had rehearsed our vows, and discovered
as we spoke them that they were exactly what we felt. This promise to love, honor, and cherish
till death us do part was precisely a recognition of our new state of unity. Our feelings gained an
added solemnity, now that all those on whose approval we depended were silently observing us.
The words seemed to echo back from the unseen wall of sympathy in the church behind, and—
far from announcing our bondage—they were a cry of liberation, the real liberation that comes
through accepting a moral law. In my first marriage, I had lost my freedom by wanting to hold
on to it. In my second, I regained it at the moment when I freely gave it away. When we first
met, I had just acquired the old farm where we now live. It is a truth universally acknowledged
that a single man in possession of a house and 30 acres must be in want of a wife. But Sophie
was as surprised by what happened as I was and entered my life almost on tiptoe, disturbing
nothing and seeming to admire my bachelor ways at the same time as she gently and discreetly
abolished them. Under her influence I became more outgoing and more relaxed, while never for
a moment fearing that I might lose my carefully acquired routines and my armory of homegrown
protections. There resulted from this an unusual division of roles: I do the cooking and the
housework; she looks after the animals. We work at our desks in the day and ride out when we
can. And whenever one of us crosses the house to peer at the other, it is always with a thrill of
anticipation, like a child creeping up on its parent. Sometimes we embark on a quarrel, but there
is neither winner nor loser, because we are one thing, not two, and any attack on the other
becomes an attack on oneself. All the matters over which people like us are supposed to argue—
money, freedom, visits, friends, hobbies, tastes, habits—become occasions for a deeper
cooperation. What we have discovered through marriage is not the first love that induced it but
the second love that follows, as the vow weaves life and life together. Western romanticism has
fostered the illusion that first love is the truest love, and what need has first love of marriage?
But an older and wiser tradition recognizes that the best of love comes after marriage, not before.
The birth of Sam did not change things. But it presented us with a problem that is particularly
acute in Britain. The state now forces us to send our children to school, while ensuring that
nothing much in the way of education occurs there. What passes for education in many British
schools is really a process of demoralization, in which children are taken from their parents and
surrendered to their peers. Today, significant numbers of young Britons leave school unable to
read or do mental arithmetic. Useless old subjects like Latin, Greek, and higher mathematics
have disappeared, and English grammar, with its oppressive rules and useless complexities, has
been pushed aside as "elitist." As for manners, these have declined to such an extent that shops
near London schools regularly close their doors to children, while older people seek refuge in
another car when children board a train. Instead of preparing children for adult life, our system of
education ensures that they remain children, with all of childhood's self-centered incompetence
but none of its redeeming innocence and shame. The state's attempt to sexualize children—
encouraging members of the younger generation to master all the relevant positions by the age of
14, and making homosexuality a central part of their curriculum—doesn't help matters. Sex,
pupils learn, is just an extension of childhood—another realm of play, in which all is permitted
that could lead to enjoyment, and in which only the serious, the lasting, and the loving are
dangerous. The sixties' ideology, which caused such havoc in my own personal life, and the evil
effects of which it took me 20 years to overcome, is now an obligatory basis of schooling,
enforced from the tenderest age, and with complete disregard for the personal happiness and
long-term hopes of the pupils. What I escaped only with the greatest difficulty and by the skin of
my teeth is now being imposed as a general destiny. Surely, the first of my duties toward Sam is
to ensure that he does not fall into the clutches of the people who want to do this to him. The new
curriculum, which has both the aim and the effect of cutting off children from their parents,
making them unlovable to adults and the exclusive property of the state, springs from the minds
of people who are themselves, for the most part, childless. It would be better, it seemed to us, for
Sam to be sent down a coal mine, there to encounter the real world of adults, than to go through
the complete course in demoralization that our rulers require. Even the private schools must
follow the National Curriculum, which has been carefully devised to remove all the knowledge
that Sophie and I value and to substitute the "life skills" needed in an urban slum. The only
solution that has occurred to us so far is to educate Sam ourselves for as long as time, energy,
and knowledge permit and then to send him to the Lycée Francaise in London, on the
understanding that the French have been slightly less contemptuous toward their national culture
than we have been. As to what Sam's curriculum should be, common sense directs us down the
old and beaten path. And we shall start him off with Grimm, Andersen, and Lewis Carroll, since
their brand of children's literature does not merely enlarge the imagination: it also educates the
moral sense. While pondering this matter, however, I was invited by a national newspaper to
describe what we intended for Sam—a sign that many people share our concerns. Naturally, I
assured the readers, if John Stuart Mill could read Greek at six, why not Sam? And maybe Sam's
first public utterance could match that of the four-year-old Macaulay, deflecting the meddlesome
attentions of a toddler-coddler, after he had hurt himself, with the words: "I thank you, Madam,
the agony is abated." Sam would be kept away from pop music and television but would study
the viola as a salutary form of self-abasement. He would be introduced to horses and fox hunting,
so as to learn both to care for animals and to do so unsentimentally. He would be taught the
virtues—courage, justice, prudence, and temperance—in their Christian version, as forms of
faith, hope, and charity. And although Sam would probably not enjoy his childhood, I wrote, he
would emerge from it as someone agreeable to others, whether or not happy in himself. The
article precipitated a storm of abuse from experts in child-rearing, educational gurus, feminists,
and assorted believers in progress—all manifestly products of an education system that identifies
irony as an elitist crime and has therefore extinguished the ability to understand it. For several
weeks, we lived in dread of the social workers. If we could not answer their inquiries, we feared,
Sam would be put into foster care, denied all access to his parents, and given a normal diet of
pop, television, and takeout.
The experts who greeted our educational plans with such outrage were, after all, the voice of our
modern culture—the very same culture that has shaped the educational system and set up the
state in opposition to the family. It is only since becoming part of a family that I have fully
gauged the depth and seriousness of this opposition. The family has become a subversive
institution—almost an underground conspiracy—at war with the state and the state-sponsored
culture. Hence the official curriculum has rigorously excluded the family. Mothers appear from
time to time in schoolbooks, but they are conspicuously single. Fathers are never mentioned—
indeed, they have become unmentionable, as trousers were to our Victorian ancestors. The state-
imposed sex education is designed to sever the link between sex and the family, by showing the
family to be merely an "option." Sex education will ensure that the next generation will not form
families, since it will have destroyed in its pupils everything that leads one sex to idealize the
other and so to channel erotic feelings into marriage. But Sophie and I have no doubt that it is the
family, not the state, that fulfills us. Hence we have decided to follow our own instincts and
observations, and to bring up our children as we believe to be right. We are members of a
growing class of criminals, who have declared war on the state-sponsored culture and are
prepared to challenge it. This official culture is founded on the premise that the human material
is infinitely plastic and can be molded by the state into any shape required. This is one of the first
of the official doctrines that you learn, as a parent, to doubt. We compared Sam with other boys
and could not help remarking how similar they are in one fundamental respect: which is, that
they all want to be men. Moreover, they all associate manliness with action, with the use of tools,
with the making of something out of nothing, and with power and the machines that produce it.
Sam has shown little concern for language, has entirely neglected not only the viola but also the
guitar and the piano, and has confined his musical experiments to turning on the rhythm machine
of my electronic keyboard whenever he sees me working. His principal interest is building. He
spends his days with the men who are working on our extension—handing out trowels, heaving
buckets, mixing his own version of cement and occasionally using it to make plaster casts of
living chickens. Although he is unlikely to emulate either Mill or Macaulay, his eager,
cooperative nature, his determination to be useful, and his narrow but real curiosity about the
world of masculine labor has endeared him to many hearts. The official doctrine attributes such
tendencies to culture: change the toys, the role models, and the contexts, the experts say, and
boys will dress up, play with dolls, coddle animals, and make little interiors where they can be
snug as a bug in a rug. But there seems to be a paucity of supporting evidence for such a view.
Science, common sense, and recorded history all point to the conclusion that sex is a constant,
which influences what can be achieved and what can be desired. Rather than work against it, we
should work with it, to use its vast and unconscious power to drive our civilizing purpose. The
birth of our baby girl Lucy again awoke our curiosity in this respect, and while we of course
intend to bring her up in the same improving regime that we proposed for Sam, we are fairly sure
that she will not be seen, 12 months hence, with a trowel in her hand. Lucy's first smile was
enough to convince us of this. Whereas Sam grinned broadly and mischievously, and then
reached out to tear down the toy horse that hung above his crib, Lucy offered a serene, observing
twinkle. Friends and neighbors all confirm the view that little girls are interested in people, in
words, in the intimate togetherness of home, and that tools and machines fail to awaken their
sympathies. Why should people resist the obvious, when it comes to sexual roles? The answer, I
believe, goes to the heart of our modern anxieties. In the world described by Jane Austen, men
and women enjoyed separate spheres of action, the first public, the second private, the first
involving influence without intimacy, the second an intimacy that was also a form of far-
reaching, though publicly hidden, influence. Dress, manners, education, recreation, and language
all reinforced this division, with marriage as the great life-choice in which it culminated and
whose purpose it was. Because there is no going back to Jane Austen's world, we take refuge in
the belief that every aspect of it reflects some arbitrary cultural imperative, with nothing due to
permanent human nature. By extending cultural relativism even into those spheres where it is not
culture but nature that determines what we do, we deceive ourselves into accepting—but with
anxiety—a situation so novel that our ancestors never even thought to guard against it: the
situation in which men and women are exchangeable in all their social roles and all their spheres
of action.
It seems to me, however, that we do our children a disservice if we fail to acknowledge that their
sexual nature sets them from the beginning on different paths. We should learn not to deny sex
but to idealize it—to set before our children an image of the good man and the good woman, and
to teach them to imitate what can be loved and admired. Even without the old division of roles,
we can envisage alternative forms of role-playing that serve a comparable function—that rescue
sex from animal appetite and make it the foundation of a lasting commitment. Children, in their
innocence, have an inkling of this. Sam with his trowel is idealizing himself; just as Lucy will
idealize herself as she reads stories to her dolls and tends their fictitious ailments. Idealization is
natural to human beings; for it is the process whereby they try to make themselves lovable and to
live in the only security that our life provides. In our marriage vows, Sophie and I were making
the same attempt. We knew the fickle lot of the human animal; we knew that married life would
be fraught with temptations and frustrations. But we knew also that those things are not the only
reality. We become fully human when we aim to be more than human; it is by living in the light
of an ideal that we live with our imperfections. That is the deep reason why a vow can never be
reduced to a contract: the vow is a pledge to the ideal light in you; a contract is signed by your
self-interested shadow. You do no service to a child by preparing him for the lower life—the life
of the state-produced animal. Happiness comes through ideals, and it is only by idealizing each
other that people can really fall in love. Such is the lesson that Sophie and I draw from our own
experience, and we are surely not unique in this but normal human beings. The strange
superstition has arisen in the Western world that we can start all over again, remaking human
nature, human society, and the possibilities of happiness, as though the knowledge and
experience of our ancestors were now entirely irrelevant. But on what fund of knowledge are we
to draw when framing our alternative? The utopias have proved to be illusions, and the most
evident result of our "liberation" from traditional constraints has been widespread discontent
with the human condition. It seems to me, therefore, that you should prepare your children to be
happy in the way that you are happy. Treat them exactly as you would if your own ideals were
generally shared. One day they will find, as we have found, the partner who makes it all
 worthwhile. Knowing this, we can re-apply ourselves to the education of Sam and Lucy,
systematically depriving them, day after day, of the things our rulers recommend.

Shameless and loveless

 ROGER SCRUTON
Sexual intercourse began, according to Philip Larkin's famous poem, in 1963. Four decades have
elapsed since then, and these decades have seen a growing recognition that sexual liberation is not
the answer to the problems of sex but a new addition to them. Traditional sexual morality reinforced
the society-wide commitment to marriage as the sole legitimate avenue to sexual release. It is easy to
understand such a morality. It has a clear social function ensuring stable families and guaranteeing
the transfer of social capital from one generation to the next. And it has an intrinsic rational appeal in
making sense of love, commitment, jealousy, courtship and the drama of the sexes. The problem is
that, by impeding our pleasures, it creates a strong motive to escape from it. And escape from it we
did, with a great burst of jubilation that very quickly dwindled to an apprehensive gulp. The
condition in which we now find ourselves is novel in many ways. Perhaps the most interesting is the
enormous effort that is now devoted to overcoming or abolishing shame. The Book of Genesis tells
the story of man's fall, caused by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Until eating
the forbidden fruit, the Bible tells us, 'they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not
ashamed'. No sooner had they eaten, however, than 'the eyes of them both were opened, and they
knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons'. When
you do something wrong and are discovered you feel ashamed of yourself. This kind of shame is a
moral emotion, founded on the thought that someone else is judging you. But it is not what is
referred to in the verses quoted, which are about sexual shame. Sexual shame differs from moral
shame in two ways. First, it is not a confession of wrongdoing: on the contrary, it testifies to the
reluctance to do or suffer wrong. Secondly, it is not troubled, as moral shame is troubled, by the
thought that you are being judged as a self, a free being, a moral subject. On the contrary, it arises
from the thought that you are being judged as a body, a mechanism, an object. Hence the German
philosopher Max Scheler described sexual shame as a Schutzgefühl a shield-emotion that protects
you from abuse, whether by another or yourself. If we lose the capacity for shame we do not regain
the innocence of the animals; we become shameless, and that means that we are no longer protected
from the sexual predator.

Shame still existed in 1963. Couples hid their desire from the world, and sometimes from each other
at least until the moment when it could be clearly expressed. Obscenity was frowned upon, and by
nobody more than the prophets of liberation, such as Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown. Sex,
for them, was something beautiful, sacred even, which must not be sullied by dirty language,
lavatorial humour or exhibitionist displays. Shame has since been banished from the culture. This we
witness in Reality TV which ought to be called Fantasy TV since that is its function. All fig leaves,
whether of language, thought or behaviour, have now been removed, and the feral children are right
there before our eyes, playing their dirty games on the screen. It is not a pretty sight, but nor is it
meant to be. This shamelessness is encouraged by sex education in our schools, which tries both to
discount the differences between us and the other animals, and to remove every hint of the forbidden,
the dangerous or the sacred. Shame, according to the standard literature now endorsed by the DES, is
a lingering disability. Sexual initiation means learning to overcome such 'negative' emotions, to put
aside our hesitations, and to enjoy 'good sex'. Questions as to 'who', 'whom' or 'which gender' are
matters of personal choice sex education is not there to make the choice, merely to facilitate it. In this
way we encourage children to a premature and depersonalised interest in their own sexuality, and at
the same time we become hysterical at the thought of all those paedophiles out there, who are really
the paedophiles in here. I see in this the clear proof that shame is not a luxury, still less an inhibition
to be discarded, but an integral part of the human condition. It is the emotion without which true
sexual desire cannot develop, and if there is such a thing as genuine sex education, it consists in
teaching children not to discard shame but to acquire it. Equally novel is the loss of the concept of
normal sexual desire. In 1963 we still saw homosexuality as a perversion, even if an enviably
glamorous one. We still believed that sexual desire had a normal course, in which man and woman
come together by mutual consent and to their mutual pleasure. We regarded sex with children as
abhorrent and sex with animals as unthinkable, except for literary purposes. Thanks in part to
massive propaganda from the gay lobby, in part to the mendacious pseudo-science put out by the
Kinsey Institute (whose charlatan founder has now been admitted to the ranks of saints and heroes),
we have abandoned the concept of perversion, and accepted the official view of 'sexual orientation' as
a natural and inescapable fact. Indeed, things have gone further. Around 1963 the philosopher
Michael Polanyi presented his theory of 'moral inversion', according to which disapproval once
directed at an activity may become directed instead at the people who still disapprove of it. By moral
inversion we protect ourselves from our previous beliefs and from the guilt of discarding them.
Moral inversion has infected the debate about sexual inversion to the point of silencing it. To suggest
that it would be better if children were not exposed to homosexuality or encouraged to think of it as
normal, that the gay scene is not the innocent thing that it claims to be but a form of sexual predation
to make those suggestions now, however hesitantly, is to lay yourself open to the charge of
'homophobia'. And this will spell the end of your career in any place, such as a university, which has
freedom of opinion as its guiding purpose. In this area, as in so many others, the ruling principle of
liberalism applies; namely, all opinions are permitted, so long as they are liberal. Novel too is the
way in which sex and the sexual act are now described. In 1963 it was possible just to believe that the
language of Lady Chatterley's Lover safeguarded the moral core of sexual emotion, and showed it to
be the beautiful and personal thing that it is. Sex, for Lawrence and his liberated followers, was still
something holy, which could therefore be defiled. Forty years on we have acquired a habit of
describing sex in demeaning and depersonalised terms. Having lost all sense of the human being as
'made in God's image', we take revenge on the body by describing it in what the Lawrentians would
regard as sacrilegious language.

A significant contribution has been made, in this respect, by pornography. You can study a picture
and see only lines, colours and shapes, while failing to notice the face that shines in and through
them. So you can look at a person and see only the body, and not the self that lives in it. It is
precisely our sexual interest that presents us with this choice: whether to see the other as subject or as
object. And this explains both the charm and the danger of pornography, which represents people as
objects, so that the body becomes peculiarly opaque, a prison door behind which the self shifts
invisibly, inaudibly and inaccessibly. People are repelled by pornography and also fascinated by it,
and now that it is available to everyone on the internet, it seems that just about everyone is logging
on. The growing toleration of pornography, which will soon be regarded as an industry like any
other, protected against criticism by the same moral inversion that now protects homosexuality, is
rapidly changing the way in which the human body is perceived. One way of understanding this
change is by invoking Kenneth Clark's distinction between the naked and the nude. In Titian's nudes
you will often find a lapdog, whose eyes and posture express an eager interest in the woman who
reclines on the couch. Dogs have no conception of what it is to be naked, and their calm
unembarrassability before the sight of human flesh reminds us of how very different the human form
is in their eyes and in ours. In this way Titian returns us to the Garden of Eden, instructing us that we
are not to see this body as naked, as though the woman were exposing herself to us in the manner of
the girl on Page Three. The nude's sexuality is not offered to us, but remains latent and expectant
within her awaiting the lover to whom it can be offered not shamelessly, but nevertheless without
shame. The dog reminds us that she, unlike he, is capable of shame, while being neither ashamed nor
shameless. This stupendous fact is presented to us not as a thought or a theory, but as a revelation the
kind of revelation that is contained in every human form, but which is of necessity hidden by our
daily commerce and retrieved and clarified by art. The people in the pornographic image are not nude
like Titian's Venus but naked even if they are also partly clothed. The focus is on the sexual act and
the sexual organs, which are exposed, framed by the camera and detached from any personal
emotion. In this way pornography effects a shift in focus a shift downwards from the human person,
the object of love and desire, to the human animal, the object of transferable fantasies. This shift in
focus is also a profanation. By focusing on the wrong things we pollute and diminish the right things.
In pornography, desire is detached from love, and attached to the mute machinery of sex. This is
damaging to adults in just the same way that modern sex education is damaging to children. For it
undermines the possibility of real erotic love, which comes only when the sexual act is hedged round
with prohibitions, and offered as a gift and an existential commitment. The growth of internet porn is
easily explained, however. Pornography has a function, which is precisely to relieve us of
commitments. Life in the actual world is difficult and embarrassing. Most of all is it difficult and
embarrassing in our confrontation with other people who, by their very existence, make demands that
we may be unwilling to meet. It requires a great force, a desire that fixes upon an individual, and sees
that individual as unique and irreplaceable, if people are to make the sacrifices upon which the
community depends for its longevity. It is far easier to take refuge in surrogates, which neither
embarrass us nor resist our cravings. The habit grows of creating a compliant world of desire, in
which the erotic force is dissipated and the needs of love denied. The effect of pornographic fantasy
is therefore to 'commodify' the object of desire, and to replace love and its vestigial sacraments with
the law of exchange. When sex becomes a commodity, the most important sanctuary of human ideals
becomes a market, and value is reduced to price. That is what has happened in the last few decades,
and it is the root fact of post-modern culture, the ultimate explanation of what is observed and
commented upon on every side namely, that our culture has become not just shameless, but loveless.
For the human body has been downgraded in our perception from subject to object, from self to tool.
The distinction between body and self is not to be explained as a distinction between the physical
body and the ethereal soul. It is a distinction between two ways of seeing our embodiment. Nor is it a
distinction that we can really apply to the rest of creation. But it belongs to the truth of our condition.
And it is only when we look on people as we should, so that their physical embodiment becomes
transparent to the self-conscious viewpoint that is uniquely theirs, that we see the moral reality. That
moral reality is what is meant when it is written that we are made in the image of God. Take that
phrase as a metaphor if you like; but it still refers to something real, namely the embodiment in the
human form of a free being, capable of desire, love and commitment and capable also, therefore, of
shame. This reality was vivid to us four decades ago; today it is still perceived, but through a glass
darkly. These radical changes have consequences that nobody would have foreseen in 1963. It was
still assumed in that year that men made advances, and that women gave in to them only when
consent was complete. What happened thereafter was the responsibility of man and woman alike.
This assumption can no longer be made. In the world of 'safe sex' those old habits of courtship seem
tedious and redundant. If sex is simply the pleasurable transaction that is on sale over the internet and
advertised in schools, then consent is easily obtained and easily signified. But it seems as though
consent, offered so freely and without regard for the preliminaries once assumed to be indispensable,
is not really consent and can be withdrawn at any time, even retrospectively. The charges of
harassment or even 'date rape' lie always in reserve. The slap in the face which used to curtail
importunate advances is now offered after the event, and in a far more deadly form a form which is
no longer private, intimate and remediable, but public, militarised and, in America at least,
possessing the absolute objectivity of law. 'Date rape' is now a serious and increasing crime on the
American campus. It doesn't matter that the girl said 'yes', since yes means no. In the absence of
feminine modesty, ardent courtship and masculine address behaviour still common in 1963 you
cannot assume that a woman knows what she is doing when she does it with you. You might take this
as showing that 'safe sex' is really sex at its most dangerous. Maybe marriage is the only safe sex that
we know. With the crime of 'date rape' has come the lesser crime of sexual harassment, which means
(to put it honestly) advances made by an unattractive man. The choreography of seduction was
inherited in 1963 from the institution of marriage. But it has since decayed to the point where men
are forced to be blunt about what they want, while being no longer trained to disguise their desires
behind an offer of protection. In consequence unattractive men, reduced to blurting out their sexual
need to its reluctant object, expose themselves to humiliation. And because women, however much
they are schooled in feminist ideology, despise men who fail to be men and who appear to treat them
as mere commodities, 'sexual harassment' has become a serious and wildly proliferating charge, a
way in which women can release their generalised anger against men an anger which is itself the
long-term product of sexual liberation, and among the most distressing of the many legacies of 1963.
For four decades we have been defying human nature, making purely theoretical assumptions which
fly in the face of customs and instincts that have existed, in one form or another, from the beginning
of recorded history. Sexual liberation is here to stay; but we should try to temper it, to rescue the
natural order that it threatens, and to safeguard the two great projects which, since 1963, have been in
such serious decline: the project of love and the project of raising children.

by Roger Scruton
On the author’s student days in Paris.(2003)

Iwas brought up at a time when half the English people voted Conservative at national
elections and almost all English intellectuals regarded the term “conservative” as a term of
abuse. To be a conservative, I was told, was to be on the side of age against youth, the past
against the future, authority against innovation, the “structures” against spontaneity and life.
It was enough to understand this, to recognize that one had no choice, as a free-thinking
intellectual, save to reject conservatism. The choice remaining was between reform and
revolution. Do we improve society bit by bit, or do we rub it out and start again? On the
whole my contemporaries favored the second option, and it was when witnessing what this
meant, in May 1968 in Paris, that I discovered my vocation. In the narrow street below my
window the students were shouting and smashing. The plate-glass windows of the shops
appeared to step back, shudder for a second, and then give up the ghost, as the reflections
suddenly left them and they slid in jagged fragments to the ground. Cars rose into the air and
landed on their sides, their juices flowing from unseen wounds. The air was filled with
triumphant shouts, as one by one lamp-posts and bollards were uprooted and piled on the
tarmac, to form a barricade against the next van-load of policemen. The van—known then as
a panier de salade on account of the wire mesh that covered its windows—came cautiously
round the corner from the Rue Descartes, jerked to a halt, and disgorged a score of frightened
policemen. They were greeted by flying cobble-stones and several of them fell. One rolled
over on the ground clutching his face, from which the blood streamed through tightly
clenched fingers. There was an exultant shout, the injured policeman was helped into the van,
and the students ran off down a side-street, sneering at the cochons and throwing Parthian
cobbles as they went. That evening a friend came round: she had been all day on the
barricades with a troupe of theater people, under the captainship of Armand Gatti. She was
very excited by the events, which Gatti, a follower of Antonin Artaud, had taught her to
regard as the high point of situationist theater—the artistic transfiguration of an absurdity
which is the day-to-day meaning of bourgeois life. Great victories had been scored:
policemen injured, cars set alight, slogans chanted, graffiti daubed. The bourgeoisie were on
the run and soon the Old Fascist and his régime would be begging for mercy. The Old Fascist
was de Gaulle, whose Mémoires de guerre I had been reading that day. The Mémoires begin
with a striking sentence—“Toute ma vie, je me suis fait une certaine idée de la France”—a
sentence so alike in its rhythm and so contrary in its direction to that equally striking
sentence which begins A la recherche du temps perdu: “Longtemps, je me suis couché de
bonne heure.” How amazing it had been, to discover a politician who begins his self-
vindication by suggesting something—and something so deeply hidden behind the bold mask
of his words! I had been equally struck by the description of the state funeral for Valéry—de
Gaulle’s first public gesture on liberating Paris—since it too suggested priorities
unimaginable in an English politician. The image of the cortège, as it took its way to the
cathedral of Notre Dame, the proud general first among the mourners, and here and there a
German sniper still looking down from the rooftops, had made a vivid impression on me. I
irresistibly compared the two bird’s-eye views of Paris, that of the sniper, and my own on to
the riots in the quartier latin. They were related as yes and no, the affirmation and denial of a
national idea. According to the Gaullist vision, a nation is defined not by institutions or
borders but by language, religion, and high culture; in times of turmoil and conquest it is
those spiritual things that must be protected and reaffirmed. The funeral for Valéry followed
naturally from this way of seeing things. And I associated the France of de Gaulle with
Valéry’s Cimetière marin—that haunting invocation of the dead which conveyed to me,
much more profoundly than any politician’s words or gestures, the true meaning of a national
idea. Of course I was naïve—as naïve as my friend. But the ensuing argument is one to
which I have often returned in my thoughts. What, I asked, do you propose to put in the place
of this “bourgeoisie” whom you so despise, and to whom you owe the freedom and
prosperity that enable you to play on your toy barricades? What vision of France and its
culture compels you? And are you prepared to die for your beliefs, or merely to put others at
risk in order to display them? I was obnoxiously pompous: but for the first time in my life I
had felt a surge of political anger, finding myself on the other side of the barricades from all
the people I knew. She replied with a book: Foucault’s Les mots et les choses, the bible of
the soixante-huitards, the text which seemed to justify every form of transgression, by
showing that obedience is merely defeat. It is an artful book, composed with a satanic
mendacity, selectively appropriating facts in order to show that culture and knowledge are
nothing but the “discourses” of power. The book is not a work of philosophy but an exercise
in rhetoric. Its goal is subversion, not truth, and it is careful to argue—by the old nominalist
sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Lies—that “truth” requires inverted
commas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the
“episteme,” imposed by the class which profits from its propagation. The revolutionary spirit,
which searches the world for things to hate, has found in Foucault a new literary formula.
Look everywhere for power, he tells his readers, and you will find it. Where there is power
there is oppression. And where there is oppression there is the right to destroy. In the street
below my window was the translation of that message into deeds. My friend is now a good
bourgeoise like the rest of them. Armand Gatti is forgotten; and the works of Antonin Artaud
have a quaint and dépassé air. The French intellectuals have turned their backs on ’68, and
the late Louis Pauwels, the greatest of their post-war novelists, has, in Les Orphelins, written
the damning obituary of their adolescent rage. And Foucault? He is dead from AIDS, the
result of sprees in the bath-houses of San Francisco, visited during well-funded tours as an
intellectual celebrity. But his books are on university reading lists all over Europe and
America. His vision of European culture as the institutionalized form of oppressive power is
taught everywhere as gospel, to students who have neither the culture nor the religion to
resist it. Only in France is he widely regarded as a fraud. By 1971, when I moved from
Cambridge to a permanent lectureship at Birkbeck College, London, I had become a
conservative. So far as I could discover there was only one other conservative at Birkbeck,
and that was Nunzia—Maria Annunziata—the Neapolitan lady who served meals in the
Senior Common Room and who cocked a snook at the lecturers by plastering her counter
with kitschy photos of the Pope. One of those lecturers, towards whom Nunzia conceived a
particular antipathy, was Eric Hobsbawm, the lionized historian of the Industrial Revolution,
whose Marxist vision of our country is now the orthodoxy taught in British schools.
Hobsbawm came as a refugee to Britain, bringing with him the Marxist commitment and
Communist Party membership that he retained until he could retain it no longer—the Party,
to his chagrin, having dissolved itself in embarrassment at the lies that could no longer be
repeated. No doubt in recognition of this heroic career, Hobsbawm was rewarded, at Mr.
Blair’s behest, with the second highest award that the Queen can bestow—that of
“Companion of Honour.” This little story is of enormous significance to a British
conservative. For it is a symptom and a symbol of what has happened to our intellectual life
since the Sixties. We should ponder the extraordinary fact that Oxford University, which
granted an honorary degree to Bill Clinton on the grounds that he had once hung around its
precincts, refused the same honor to Margaret Thatcher, its most distinguished post-war
graduate and Britain’s first woman Prime Minister. We should ponder some of the other
recipients of honorary degrees from British academic institutions—Robert Mugabe, for
example, or the late Mrs. Ceausescu—or count (on the fingers of one hand) the number of
conservatives who are elected to the British Academy. Suffice it to say that I found myself,
on arrival in Birkbeck College, at the heart of the left establishment which governed British
scholarship. Birkbeck College had grown from the Mechanics Institution founded by George
Birkbeck in 1823 and was devoted to the education of people in full-time employment. It was
connected to the socialist idealists of the Workers’ Education Association, and had links of a
tenacious but undiscoverable kind to the Labour Party. My failure to conceal my
conservative beliefs was both noticed and disapproved of, and I began to think that I should
look for another career. Because of Birkbeck’s mission as a center of adult education,
lectures began at 6 P.M. and the days were nominally free. I used my mornings to study for
the Bar: my intention was to embark on a career which gave no advantage to utopians and
malcontents. In fact I never practiced at the Bar and received from my studies only an
intellectual benefit—though a benefit for which I have always been profoundly grateful. Law
is constrained at every point by reality, and utopian visions have no place in it. Moreover the
common law of England is proof that there is a real distinction between legitimate and
illegitimate power, that power can exist without oppression, and that authority is a living
force in human conduct. English law, I discovered, is the answer to Foucault. Inspired by my
new studies I began to search for a conservative philosophy. In America this search could be
conducted in a university. American departments of political science encourage their students
to read Montesquieu, Burke, Tocqueville, and the Founding Fathers. Leo Strauss, Eric
Voegelin, and others have grafted the metaphysical conservatism of Central Europe on to
American roots, forming effective and durable schools of political thought. American
intellectual life benefits from American patriotism, which has made it possible to defend
American customs and institutions without fear of being laughed to scorn. It has benefited
too from the Cold War, which sharpened native wits against the Marxist enemy, in a way that
they were never sharpened in Europe: the conversion of important parts of the social
democratic Jewish intelligentsia of New York to the cause of neo-conservatism is a case in
point. In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad
recluses. Searching the library of my college, I found Marx, Lenin, and Mao, but no Strauss,
Voegelin, Hayek, or Friedman. I found every variety of socialist monthly, weekly, or
quarterly, but not a single journal that confessed to being conservative. The view has for a
long time prevailed in England that conservatism is simply no longer available—even if it
ever has been really available to an intelligent person—as a social and political creed.
Maybe, if you are an aristocrat or a child of wealthy and settled parents, you
might inherit conservative beliefs, in the way that you might inherit a speech impediment or
a Habsburg jaw. But you couldn’t possibly acquire them—certainly not by any process of
rational enquiry or serious thought. And yet there I was, in the early 1970s, fresh from the
shock of 1968, and from the countervailing shock of legal studies, with a fully articulate set
of conservative beliefs. Where could I look for the people who shared them, for the thinkers
who had spelled them out at proper length, for the social, economic, and political theory that
would give them force and authority sufficient to argue them in the forum of academic
opinion? To my rescue came Burke. Although not widely read at the time in our universities,
he had not been dismissed as stupid, reactionary, or absurd. He was simply irrelevant, of
interest largely because he got everything wrong about the French Revolution and therefore
could be studied as illustrating an episode in intellectual pathology. Students were still
permitted to read him, usually in conjunction with the immeasurably less interesting Tom
Paine, and from time to time you heard tell of a “Burkean” philosophy, which was one strand
within nineteenth-century British conservatism.

Burke was of additional interest to me on account of the intellectual path that he had trod.
His first work, like mine, was in aesthetics. And although I didn’t find much of philosophical
significance in his Essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful, I could see that, in the right
cultural climate, it would convey a powerful sense of the meaning of aesthetic judgment and
of its indispensable place in our lives. I suppose that, in so far as I had received any
intimations of my future career as an intellectual pariah, it was through my early reactions to
modern architecture, and to the desecration of my childhood landscape by the faceless boxes
of suburbia. I learned as a teenager that aesthetic judgment matters, that it is not merely a
subjective opinion, unargued because unarguable, and of no significance to anyone besides
oneself. I saw—though I did not have the philosophy to justify this—that aesthetic judgment
lays a claim upon the world, that it issues from a deep social imperative, and that it matters to
us in just the way that other people matter to us, when we strive to live with them in a
community. And, so it seemed to me, the aesthetics of modernism, with its denial of the past,
its vandalization of the landscape and townscape, and its attempt to purge the world of
history, was also a denial of community, home, and settlement. Modernism in architecture
was an attempt to remake the world as though it contained nothing save atomic individuals,
disinfected of the past, and living like ants within their metallic and functional shells. Like
Burke, therefore, I made the passage from aesthetics to conservative politics with no sense of
intellectual incongruity, believing that, in each case, I was in search of a lost experience of
home. And I suppose that, underlying that sense of loss is the permanent belief that what has
been lost can also be recaptured—not necessarily as it was when it first slipped from our
grasp, but as it will be when consciously regained and remodelled, to reward us for all the
toil of separation through which we are condemned by our original transgression. That belief
is the romantic core of conservatism, as you find it—very differently expressed—in Burke
and Hegel, and also in T. S. Eliot, whose poetry was the greatest influence on me during my
teenage years. When I first read Burke’s account of the French Revolution I was inclined to
accept, since I knew no other, the liberal humanist view of the Revolution as a triumph of
freedom over oppression, a liberation of a people from the yoke of absolute power. Although
there were excesses—and no honest historian had ever denied this—the official humanist
view was that they should be seen in retrospect as the birth-pangs of a new order, which
would offer a model of popular sovereignty to the world. I therefore assumed that Burke’s
early doubts—expressed, remember, when the Revolution was in its very first infancy, and
the King had not yet been executed nor the Terror begun—were simply alarmist reactions to
an ill-understood event. What interested me in the Reflections was the positive political
philosophy, distinguished from all the leftist literature that was currently à la mode, by its
absolute concretion, and its close reading of the human psyche in its ordinary and unexalted
forms. Burke was not writing about socialism, but about revolution. Nevertheless he
persuaded me that the utopian promises of socialism go hand in hand with a wholly abstract
vision of the human mind—a geometrical version of our mental processes which has only the
vaguest relation to the thoughts and feelings by which real human beings live. He persuaded
me that societies are not and cannot be organized according to a plan or a goal, that there is
no direction to history, and no such thing as moral or spiritual progress. Most of all he
emphasized that the new forms of politics, which hope to organize society around the rational
pursuit of liberty, equality, fraternity, or their modernist equivalents, are actually forms of
militant irrationality. There is no way in which people can collectively pursue liberty,
equality, and fraternity, not only because those things are lamentably underdescribed and
merely abstractly defined, but also because collective reason doesn’t work that way. People
reason collectively towards a common goal only in times of emergency—when there is a
threat to be vanquished, or a conquest to be achieved. Even then, they need organization,
hierarchy, and a structure of command if they are to pursue their goal effectively.
Nevertheless, a form of collective rationality does emerge in these cases, and its popular
name is war. Moreover—and here is the corollary that came home to me with a shock of
recognition—any attempt to organize society according to this kind of rationality would
involve exactly the same conditions: the declaration of war against some real or imagined
enemy. Hence the strident and militant language of the socialist literature—the hate-filled,
purpose-filled, bourgeois-baiting prose, one example of which had been offered to me in
1968, as the final vindication of the violence beneath my attic window, but other examples of
which, starting with the Communist Manifesto, were the basic diet of political studies in my
university. The literature of left-wing political science is a literature of conflict, in which the
main variables are those identified by Lenin: “Kto? Kogo?”—“Who? Whom?” The opening
sentence of de Gaulle’s memoirs is framed in the language of love, about an object of love—
and I had spontaneously resonated to this in the years of the student “struggle.” De Gaulle’s
allusion to Proust is to a masterly evocation of maternal love, and to a dim premonition of its
loss. Three other arguments of Burke’s made a comparable impression. The first was the
defense of authority and obedience. Far from being the evil and obnoxious thing that my
contemporaries held it to be, authority was, for Burke, the root of political order. Society, he
argued, is not held together by the abstract rights of the citizen, as the French
Revolutionaries supposed. It is held together by authority—by which is meant the right to
obedience, rather than the mere power to compel it. And obedience, in its turn, is the prime
virtue of political beings, the disposition which makes it possible to govern them, and
without which societies crumble into “the dust and powder of individuality.” Those thoughts
seemed as obvious to me as they were shocking to my contemporaries. In effect Burke was
upholding the old view of man in society, as subject of a sovereign, against the new view of
him, as citizen of a state. And what struck me vividly was that, in defending this old view,
Burke demonstrated that it was a far more effective guarantee of the liberties of the
individual than the new idea, which was founded in the promise of those very liberties, only
abstractly, universally, and therefore unreally defined. Real freedom, concrete freedom, the
freedom that can actually be defined, claimed, and granted, was not the opposite of
obedience but its other side. The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really
nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy. Those ideas exhilarated me,
since they made sense of what I had seen in 1968. But when I expressed them, in a book
published in 1979 as The Meaning of Conservatism, I blighted what remained of my
academic career. The second argument of Burke’s that impressed me was the subtle defense
of tradition, prejudice, and custom, against the enlightened plans of the reformers. This
defense engaged, once again, with my study of aesthetics. Already as a schoolboy I had
encountered the elaborate defense of artistic and literary tradition given by Eliot and F. R.
Leavis. I had been struck by Eliot’s essay entitled “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in
which tradition is represented as a constantly evolving, yet continuous thing, which is
remade with every addition to it, and which adapts the past to the present and the present to
the past. This conception, which seemed to make sense of Eliot’s kind of modernism (a
modernism that is the polar opposite of that which has prevailed in architecture), also rescued
the study of the past, and made my own love of the classics in art, literature, and music into a
valid part of my psyche as a modern human being. Burke’s defense of tradition seemed to
translate this very concept into the world of politics, and to make respect for custom,
establishment, and settled communal ways, into a political virtue, rather than a sign, as my
contemporaries mostly believed, of complacency. And Burke’s provocative defense, in this
connection, of “prejudice” —by which he meant the set of beliefs and ideas that arise
instinctively in social beings, and which reflect the root experiences of social life—was a
revelation of something that until then I had entirely overlooked. Burke brought home to me
that our most necessary beliefs may be both unjustified and unjustifiable from our own
perspective, and that the attempt to justify them will lead merely to their loss. Replacing
them with the abstract rational systems of the philosophers, we may think ourselves more
rational and better equipped for life in the modern world. But in fact we are less well
equipped, and our new beliefs are far less justified, for the very reason that they are justified
by ourselves. The real justification for a prejudice is the one which justifies it as a prejudice,
rather than as a rational conclusion of an argument. In other words it is a justification that
cannot be conducted from our own perspective, but only from outside, as it were, as an
anthropologist might justify the customs and rituals of an alien tribe. An example will
illustrate the point: the prejudices surrounding sexual relations. These vary from society to
society; but until recently they have had a common feature, which is that people distinguish
seemly from unseemly conduct, abhor explicit sexual display, and require modesty in women
and chivalry in men in the negotiations that precede sexual union. There are very good
anthropological reasons for this, in terms of the long-term stability of sexual relations, and
the commitment that is necessary if children are to be inducted into society. But these are not
the reasons that motivate the traditional conduct of men and women. This conduct is guided
by deep and immovable prejudice, in which outrage, shame, and honor are the ultimate
grounds. The sexual liberator has no difficulty in showing that those motives are irrational, in
the sense of being founded on no reasoned justification available to the person whose
motives they are. And he may propose sexual liberation as a rational alternative, a code of
conduct that is rational from the first-person viewpoint, since it derives a complete code of
practice from a transparently reasonable aim, which is sexual pleasure. This substitution of
reason for prejudice has indeed occurred. And the result is exactly as Burke would have
anticipated. Not merely a breakdown in trust between the sexes, but a faltering in the
reproductive process—a failing and enfeebled commitment of parents, not merely to each
other, but also to their offspring. At the same time, individual feelings, which were shored up
and fulfilled by the traditional prejudices, are left exposed and unprotected by the skeletal
structures of rationality. Hence the extraordinary situation in America, where lawsuits have
replaced common courtesy, where post-coital accusations of “date-rape” take the place of
pre-coital modesty, and where advances made by the unattractive are routinely penalized as
“sexual harrassment.” This is an example of what happens, when prejudice is wiped away in
the name of reason, without regard for the real social function that prejudice alone can fulfill.
And indeed, it was partly by reflecting on the disaster of sexual liberation, and the joyless
world that it has produced around us, that I came to see the truth of Burke’s otherwise
somewhat paradoxical defense of prejudice. The final argument that impressed me was
Burke’s response to the theory of the social contract. Although society can be seen as a
contract, he argued, we must recognize that most parties to the contract are either dead or not
yet born. The effect of the contemporary Rousseauist ideas of social contract was to place the
present members of society in a position of dictatorial dominance over those who went
before and those who came after them. Hence these ideas led directly to the massive
squandering of inherited resources at the Revolution, and to the cultural and ecological
vandalism that Burke was perhaps the first to recognize as the principal danger of modern
politics. In Burke’s eyes the self-righteous contempt for ancestors which characterized the
Revolutionaries was also a disinheriting of the unborn. Rightly understood, he argued,
society is a partnership among the dead, the living, and the unborn, and without what he
called the “hereditary principle,” according to which rights could be inherited as well as
acquired, both the dead and the unborn would be disenfranchized. Indeed, respect for the
dead was, in Burke’s view, the only real safeguard that the unborn could obtain, in a world
that gave all its privileges to the living. His preferred vision of society was not as a contract,
in fact, but as a trust, with the living members as trustees of an inheritance that they must
strive to enhance and pass on. I was more exhilarated by those ideas than by anything else in
Burke, since they seemed to explain with the utmost clarity the dim intuitions that I had had
in 1968, as I watched the riots from my window and thought of Valéry’s Cimetière marin. In
those deft, cool thoughts, Burke summarized all my instinctive doubts about the cry for
liberation, all my hesitations about progress and about the unscrupulous belief in the future
that has dominated and perverted modern politics. In effect, Burke was joining in the old
Platonic cry, for a form of politics that would also be a form of care—“care of the soul,” as
Plato put it, which would also be a care for absent generations. The graffiti paradoxes of
the soixante-huitards were the very opposite of this: a kind of adolescent insouciance, a
throwing away of all customs, institutions, and achievements, for the sake of a momentary
exultation which could have no lasting sense save anarchy. It was not until much later, after
my first visit to communist Europe, that I came to understand and sympathize with the
negative energy in Burke. I had grasped the positive thesis—the defense of prejudice,
tradition, and heredity, and of a politics of trusteeship in which the past and the future had
equal weight to the present—but I had not grasped the deep negative thesis, the glimpse into
Hell, contained in his vision of the Revolution. As I said, I shared the liberal humanist view
of the French Revolution, and knew nothing of the facts that decisively refuted that view and
which vindicated the argument of Burke’s astonishingly prescient essay. My encounter with
Communism entirely rectified this. Perhaps the most fascinating and terrifying aspect of
Communism was its ability to banish truth from human affairs, and to force whole
populations to “live within the lie,” as President Havel put it. George Orwell wrote a
prophetic and penetrating novel about this; but few Western readers of that novel knew the
extent to which its prophecies had come true in Central Europe. To me it was the greatest
revelation, when first I travelled to Czechoslovakia in 1979, to come face to face with a
situation in which people could, at any moment, be removed from the book of history, in
which truth could not be uttered, and in which the Party could decide from day to day not
only what would happen tomorrow, but also what had happened today, what had happened
yesterday, and what had happened before its leaders had been born. This, I realized, was the
situation that Burke was describing, to a largely incredulous readership, in 1790. And two
hundred years later the situation still existed, and the incredulity along with it. Until 1979 my
knowledge of Communism had been entirely theoretical. I did not like what I had read, of
course, and was hostile in any case to the socialist ideas of equality and state control, of
which I had already seen enough in France and Britain. But I knew nothing of what it is like
to live under Communism—nothing of the day-to-day humiliation of being a non-person, to
whom all avenues of self-expression are closed. As for Czechoslovakia, as it then was, I
knew only what I had gleaned from its music—the music of Smetana, Dvo?ak, and Janá?ek
in particular, to all three of whom I owe the greatest of debts for the happiness they have
brought me. Of course, I had read Kafka and Hašek— but they belonged to another world,
the world of a dying empire, and it was only subsequently that I was able to see that they too
were prophets, and that they were describing not the present but the future of their city. I had
been asked to give a talk to a private seminar in Prague. This seminar was organized by
Julius Tomin, a Prague philosopher, who had taken advantage of the Helsinki Accords of
1975, which supposedly obliged the Czechoslovak government to uphold freedom of
information and the basic rights defined by the U.N. Charter. The Helsinki Accords were a
farce, used by the Communists to identify potential trouble-makers, while presenting a face
of civilized government to gullible intellectuals in the West. Nevertheless, I was told that Dr.
Tomin’s seminar met on a regular basis, that I would be welcome to attend it, and that they
were indeed expecting me. I arrived at the house, after walking through those silent and
deserted streets, in which the few who stood seemed occupied by some dark official
business, and in which Party slogans and symbols disfigured every building. The staircase of
the apartment building was also deserted. Everywhere the same expectant silence hung in the
air, as when an air-raid has been announced, and the town hides from its imminent
destruction. Outside the apartment, however, I encountered two policemen, who seized me as
I rang the bell and demanded my papers. Dr. Tomin came out, and an altercation ensued,
during which I was thrown down the stairs. But the argument continued and I was able to
push my way past the guard and enter the apartment. I found a room full of people, and the
same expectant silence. I realized that there really was going to be an air-raid, and that the
air-raid was me. In that room was a battered remnant of Prague’s intelligentsia—old
professors in their shabby waistcoats; long-haired poets; fresh-faced students who had been
denied admission to university for their parents’ political “crimes”; priests and religious in
plain clothes; novelists and theologians; a would-be rabbi; and even a psychoanalyst. And in
all of them I saw the same marks of suffering, tempered by hope; and the same eager desire
for the sign that someone cared enough to help them. They all belonged, I discovered, to the
same profession: that of the stoker. Some stoked boilers in hospitals; others in apartment
blocks; one stoked at a railway station, another in a school. Some stoked where there were no
boilers to stoke, and these imaginary boilers came to be, for me, a fitting symbol of the
communist economy. This was my first encounter with “dissidents”: the people who, to my
astonishment, would be the first democratically elected leaders of post-war Czechoslovakia.
And I felt towards these people an immediate affinity. Nothing was of such importance for
them as the survival of their national culture. Deprived of material and professional
advancement, their days were filled with a forced meditation on their country and its past,
and on the great Question of Czech History which has preoccupied the Czechs since
Palacky’s day. They were forbidden to publish; the authorities had concealed their existence
from the world and had resolved to remove their traces from the book of history. Hence the
dissidents were acutely conscious of the value of memory. Their lives were an exercise in
what Plato calls anamnesis: the bringing to consciousness of forgotten things. Something in
me responded to this poignant ambition, and I was at once eager to join with them and make
their situation known to the world. Briefly, I spent the next ten years in daily meditation on
Communism, on the myths of equality and fraternity that underlay its oppressive routines,
just as they had underlain the routines of the French Revolution. And I came to see that
Burke’s account of the Revolution was not merely a piece of contemporary history. It was
like Milton’s account of Paradise Lost—an exploration of a region of the human psyche: a
region that lies always ready to be visited, but from which return is by way of a miracle, to a
world whose beauty is thereafter tainted by the memories of Hell. To put it very simply, I
had been granted a vision of Satan and his work—the very same vision that had shaken
Burke to the depths of his being. And I at last recognized the positive aspect of Burke’s
philosophy as a response to that vision, as a description of the best that human beings can
hope for, and as the sole and sufficient vindication of our life on earth. Henceforth I
understood conservatism not as a political credo only, but as a lasting vision of human
society, one whose truth would always be hard to perceive, harder still to communicate, and
hardest of all to act upon. And especially hard is it now, when religious sentiments follow the
whims of fashion, when the global economy throws our local loyalties into disarray, and
when materialism and luxury deflect the spirit from the proper business of living. But I do
not despair, since experience has taught me that men and women can flee from the truth only
for so long, that they will always, in the end, be reminded of the permanent values, and that
the dreams of liberty, equality, and fraternity will excite them only in the short-term. As to
the task of transcribing, into the practice and process of modern politics, the philosophy that
Burke made plain to the world, this is perhaps the greatest task that we now confront. I do
not despair of it; but the task cannot be described or embraced by a slogan. It requires not a
collective change of mind but a collective change of heart.

Modern Manhood, Scruton: 1999

Feminists have harped and harpied on about the position of women in modern societies. But
what about the men? The radical changes in sexual mores, patterns of employment, and domestic
life have turned their lives upside down. Men now encounter women not as "the weaker sex" but
as equal competitors in the public sphere—the sphere where men used to be in charge. And in
the private sphere, where an ancient division of labor once gave guidance to those who crossed
its threshold, there is no knowing what strategy will be most effective. Manly gestures—holding
open a door for a woman, handing her into an automobile, taking charge of her bags—can spark
insulted rejection; displays of wealth, power, or influence are likely to seem ridiculous to a
woman who herself has more of them; and the disappearance of female modesty and sexual
restraint has made it hard for a man to believe, when a woman yields to his advances, that her
doing so is a special tribute to his masculine powers, rather than a day-to-day transaction, in
which he, like the last one, is dispensable.
The sexual revolution is not the only cause of men's confusion. Social, political, and legal
changes have shrunk the all-male sphere to the vanishing point, redefining every activity in
which men once proved that they were indispensable, so that now women can do the job, too—or
at any rate appear to do it. Feminists have sniffed out male pride wherever it has grown and
ruthlessly uprooted it. Under their pressure, modern culture has downgraded or rejected such
masculine virtues as courage, tenacity, and military prowess in favor of more gentle, more
"socially inclusive" habits. The advent of in vitro fertilization and the promise of cloning create
the impression that men are not even necessary for human reproduction, while the growth of the
single-parent household—in which the mother is the only adult, and the state is too often the
only provider—has made fatherless childhood into an increasingly common option. These
changes threaten to make manhood redundant, and many children now grow up to acknowledge
no source of love, authority, or guidance apart from the mother, whose men come and go like
seasonal laborers, drifting through the matriarchal realm with no prospect of a permanent
position. The unhappiness of men flows directly from the collapse of their old social role as
protectors and providers. For the feminists, this old social role was a way of confining women to
the household, where they would not compete for the benefits available outside. Its destruction,
they contend, is therefore a liberation—not of women only, but of men, too, who can now choose
whether they wish to assert themselves in the public sphere or whether, on the contrary, they
wish to stay at home with the baby (which may very well be someone else's baby). This is the
core idea of feminism—that "gender roles" are not natural but cultural, and that by changing
them we can overthrow old power structures and achieve new and more creative ways of being.
The feminist view is orthodoxy throughout the American academy, and it is the premise of all
legal and political thinking among the liberal elite, which dissidents oppose at peril of their
reputations or careers. Nevertheless, a groundswell of resistance to it is gathering force among
anthropologists and sociobiologists. Typical is Lionel Tiger, who three decades ago coined the
term "male bonding" to denote something that all men need, and that few now get. It wasn't
social convention that dictated the traditional roles of man and woman, Tiger suggests; instead,
the millions of years of evolution that formed our species made us what we are. You can make
men pretend to be less dominant and less aggressive; you can make them pretend to accept a
subordinate role in domestic life and a dependent position in society. But deep down, in the
instinctual flow of life that is manhood itself, they will rebel. The unhappiness of men, Tiger
argues, comes from this deep and unconfessed conflict between social pretense and sexual
necessity. And when manhood finally breaks out—as it inevitably will—it is in distorted and
dangerous forms, like the criminal gangs of the modern city or the swaggering misogyny of the
city slicker.
Tiger sees sex as a biological phenomenon, whose deep explanation lies in the theory of sexual
selection. Each of us, he believes, acts in obedience to a strategy built in to our genes, which seek
their own perpetuity through our sexual behavior. The genes of a woman, who is vulnerable in
childbirth and needs support during years of child-rearing thereafter, call for a mate who will
protect her and her offspring. The genes of a man require a guarantee that the children he
provides for are his own, lest all his labor be (from the genes' point of view) wasted. Hence
nature itself, working through our genes, decrees a division of roles between the sexes. It
predisposes men to fight for territory, to protect their women, to drive away rivals, and to strive
for status and recognition in the public world—the world where men conflict. It predisposes
women to be faithful, private, and devoted to the home. Both these dispositions involve the
working out of long-term genetic strategies—strategies that it is not for us to change, since we
are the effect and not the cause of them. The feminists, of course, will have none of this. Biology
may indeed assign us a sex, in the form of this or that organ. But much more important than our
sex, they say, is our "gender"—and gender is a cultural construct, not a biological fact. The term
"gender" comes from grammar, where it is used to distinguish masculine from feminine nouns.
By importing it into the discussion of sex, feminists imply that our sex roles are as man-made
and therefore malleable as syntax. Gender includes the rituals, habits, and images through which
we represent ourselves to one another as sexual beings. It is not sex but the consciousness of sex.
Hitherto, say the feminists, the "gender identity" of women is something that men have imposed
upon them. The time has come for women to forge their own gender identity, to remake their
sexuality as a sphere of freedom rather than a sphere of bondage. Taken to extremes—and
feminism takes everything to extremes—the theory reduces sex to a mere appearance, with
gender as the reality. If, having forged your true gender identity, you find yourself housed in the
wrong kind of body, then it is the body that must change. If you believe yourself to be a woman,
then you are a woman, notwithstanding the fact that you have the body of a man. Hence medical
practitioners, instead of regarding sex-change operations as a gross violation of the body and
indeed a kind of criminal assault, now endorse them, and in England the National Health Service
pays for them. Gender, in the feminists' radical conception of it, begins to sound like a dangerous
fantasy, rather like the genetic theories of Lysenko, Stalin's favorite biologist, who argued that
acquired characteristics could be inherited, so that man could mold his own nature with almost
infinite plasticity. Perhaps we should replace the old question that James Thurber put before us at
the start of the sexual revolution with a new equivalent: not "Is Sex Necessary?" but "Is Gender
Possible?" In a certain measure, however, the feminists are right to distinguish sex from gender
and to imply that we are free to revise our images of the masculine and the feminine. After all,
the sociobiologists' argument accurately describes the similarities between people and apes, but it
ignores the differences. Animals in the wild are slaves of their genes. Human beings in society
are not. The whole point of culture is that it makes us something more than creatures of mere
biology and sets us on the road to self-realization. Where in sociobiology is the self, its choices
and its fulfillment? Surely the sociobiologists are wrong to think that our genes alone determined
the traditional sex roles. But just as surely are the feminists wrong to believe that we are
completely liberated from our biological natures and that the traditional sex roles emerged only
from a social power struggle in which men were victorious and women enslaved. The traditional
roles existed in order to humanize our genes and also to control them. The masculine and
feminine were ideals, through which the animal was transfigured into the personal. Sexual
morality was an attempt to transform a genetic need into a personal relation. It existed precisely
to stop men from scattering their seed through the tribe, and to prevent women from accepting
wealth and power, rather than love, as the signal for reproduction. It was the cooperative answer
to a deep-seated desire, in both man and woman, for the "helpmeet" who will make life
meaningful. In other words, men and women are not merely biological organisms. They are also
moral beings. Biology sets limits to our behavior but does not dictate it. The arena formed by our
instincts merely defines the possibilities among which we must choose if we are to gain the
respect, acceptance, and love of one another. Men and women have shaped themselves not
merely for the purpose of reproduction but in order to bring dignity and kindness to the relations
between them. To this end, they have been in the business of creating and re-creating the
masculine and the feminine ever since they realized that the relations between the sexes must be
established by negotiation and consent, rather than by force. The difference between traditional
morality and modern feminism is that the first wishes to enhance and to humanize the difference
between the sexes, while the second wishes to discount or even annihilate it. In that sense,
feminism really is against nature. Yet at the same time, feminism seems an inevitable response to
the breakdown of the traditional sexual morality. People readily accepted the traditional roles
when honor and decency sustained them. But why should women trust men, now that men are so
quick to discard their obligations? Marriage was once permanent and safe; it offered the woman
social status and protection, long after she ceased to be sexually attractive. And it provided a
sphere in which she was dominant. The sacrifice permanent marriage demanded of men made
tolerable to women the male monopoly over the public realm, in which men competed for money
and social rewards. The two sexes respected each other's territory and recognized that each must
renounce something for their mutual benefit. Now that men in the wake of the sexual revolution
feel free to be serially polygamous, women have no secure territory of their own. They have no
choice, therefore, but to capture what they can of the territory once monopolized by men. It was
one of the great discoveries of civilization that men do not gain acceptance from women by
brashly displaying their manhood in aggressive and violating gestures. But they do gain
acceptance by being gentlemen. The gentleman was not a person with feminine gender and
masculine sex. He was through and through a man. But he was also gentle—in all the senses of
that lucent word. He was not belligerent but courageous, not possessive but protective, not
aggressive to other men but bold, even-tempered, and ready to agree on terms. He was animated
by a sense of honor—which meant taking responsibility for his actions and shielding those who
depended on him. And his most important attribute was loyalty, which implied that he would not
deny his obligations merely because he was in a position to profit from doing so. Much of the
anger of women toward men has come about because the ideal of the gentleman is now so close
to extinction. Popular entertainment has only one image of manhood to put before the young: and
it is an image of untrammeled aggression, in which automatic weapons play a major part, and in
which gentleness in whatever form appears as a weakness rather than as a strength. How far this
is from those epics of courtly love, which set in motion the European attempt to rescue manhood
from biology and reshape it as a moral idea, needs no elaboration. It was not only the upper
classes that idealized the relation between the sexes or moralized their social roles. In the
working-class community from which my father's family came, the old mutuality was part of the
routine of domestic life, encapsulated in recognized displays of masculine and feminine virtue.
One such was the Friday-night ritual of the wage packet. My grandfather would come home and
place on the kitchen table the unopened envelope containing his wages. My grandmother would
pick it up and empty it into her wallet, handing back two shillings for drink. Grandfather would
then go to the pub and drink himself into a state of proud self-assertion among his peers. If
women came to the pub they would linger in the doorway, communicating by messenger with
the smoke-filled rooms inside but respecting the threshold of this masculine arena as though it
were guarded by angels.
My grandfather's gesture, as he laid down his wage packet on the kitchen table, was imbued with
a peculiar grace: it was a recognition of my grandmother's importance as a woman, of her right to
his consideration and of her value as the mother of his children. Likewise, her waiting outside the
pub until closing time, when he would be too unconscious to suffer the humiliation of it, before
transporting him home in a wheelbarrow, was a gesture replete with feminine considerateness. It
was her way of recognizing his inviolable sovereignty as a wage earner and a man.
Courtesy, courtliness, and courtship were so many doors into the court of love, where human
beings moved as in a pageant. My grandparents were excluded by their proletarian way of life
from all other forms of courtliness, which is why this one was so important. It was their opening
to an enchantment that they could obtain in no other way. My grandfather had little to
recommend him to my grandmother, other than his strength, good looks, and manly deportment.
But he respected the woman in her and played the role of gentleman as best he could whenever
he escorted her outside the home. Hence my grandmother, who disliked him intensely—for he
was ignorant, complacent, and drunk, and stood across the threshold of her life as an immovable
obstacle to social advancement—nevertheless loved him passionately as a man. This love could
not have lasted, were it not for the mystery of gender. My grandfather's masculinity set him apart
in a sovereign sphere of his own, just as my grandmother's femininity protected her from his
aggression. All that they knew of virtue they had applied to the task of remaining to some
measure mysterious to each other. And in this they succeeded, as they succeeded in little else. A
similar division of spheres occurred throughout society, and in every corner of the globe. But
marriage was its pivotal institution, and marriage depended upon fidelity and sexual restraint.
Marriages lasted not only because divorce was disapproved of but also because marriage was
preceded by an extended period of courtship, in which love and trust could take root before
sexual experiment. This period of courtship was also one of display, in which men showed off
their manliness and women their femininity. And this is what we mean, or ought to mean, by the
"social construction" of gender. By playacting, the two partners readied themselves for their
future roles, learning to admire and cherish the separateness of their natures. The courting man
gave glamour to the masculine character, just as the courting woman gave mystery to the
feminine. And something of this glamour and mystery remained thereafter, a faint halo of
enchantment that caused each to encourage the other in the apartness that they both admired. The
Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet, Jane Austen and George Eliot, Henry James and
Charlotte Bront', all have matchlessly described all that, as has D. H. Lawrence (in its lower-
class version) in his stories. This literature shows what is missing from sociobiology. Marriage
does not merely serve the reproductive strategies of our genes; it serves the reproductive need of
society. It also serves the individual in his pursuit of a life and fulfillment of his own. Its capacity
for ordering and sanctifying erotic love goes beyond anything required by our genes. As our
Enlightenment morality rightly insists, we are also free beings, whose experience is through and
through qualified by our sense of moral value. We do not respond to one another as animals but
as persons—which means that, even in sexual desire, freedom of choice is essential to the aim.
The object of desire must be treated, in Kant's famous words, not as a means only, but as an end.
Hence true sexual desire is desire for a person, and not for sex, conceived as a generalized
commodity. We surround the sexual act with constraints and interdictions that are in no way
dictated by the species, precisely so as to focus our thoughts and desires on the free being, rather
than the bodily mechanism. In this we are immeasurably superior to our genes, whose attitude to
what is happening is, by comparison, mere pornography. Even when the sacramental view of
marriage began to wane, mankind still held erotic feelings apart, as things too intimate for public
discussion, which could only be soiled by their display. Chastity, modesty, shame, and passion
were part of an artificial but necessary drama. The erotic was idealized, in order that marriage
should endure. And marriage, construed as our parents and grandparents construed it, was both a
source of personal fulfillment and the principal way in which one generation passed on its social
and moral capital to the next. It was that vision of marriage, as a lifelong existential commitment,
that lay behind the process of "gender construction" in the days when men were tamed and
women idealized. If marriage is no longer safe, however, girls are bound to look elsewhere for
their fulfillment. And elsewhere means the public sphere—for it is a sphere dominated by
strangers, with clear rules and procedures, in which you can defend yourself from exploitation.
The advantage of inhabiting this sphere needs no explaining to a girl whose abandoned mother
lies grieving upstairs. Nor do her experiences at school or college teach her to trust or respect the
male character. Her sex-education classes have taught her that men are to be used and discarded
like the condoms that package them. And the feminist ideology has encouraged her to think that
only one thing matters—which is to discover and fulfill her true gender identity, while discarding
the false gender identity that the "patriarchal culture" has foisted upon her. Just as boys become
men without becoming manly, therefore, so do girls become women without becoming feminine.
Modesty and chastity are dismissed as politically incorrect; and in every sphere where they
encounter men, women meet them as competitors. The voice that calmed the violence of
manhood—namely, the female call for protection—has been consigned to silence. Just as the
feminine virtues existed in order to make men gentle, however, so manliness existed in order to
break down the reserve that caused women to withhold their favors until security was in sight. In
the world of "safe sex," those old habits seem tedious and redundant. In consequence, there has
arisen another remarkable phenomenon in America: the litigiousness of women toward the men
they have slept with. It seems as though consent, offered so freely and without regard for the
preliminaries once assumed to be indispensable, is not really consent and can be withdrawn
retroactively. The charges of harassment or even "date rape" lie always in reserve. The slap in
the face that used to curtail importunate advances is now offered after the event, and in a far
more deadly form—a form no longer private, intimate, and remediable, but public, regimented,
and with the absolute objectivity of law. You might take this as showing that "safe sex" is really
sex at its most dangerous. Maybe marriage is the only safe sex that we know. When Stalin
imposed Lysenko's theories upon the Soviet Union, as the "scientific" basis of his effort to re-
mold human nature and form it into the "New Soviet Man," the human economy continued,
hidden away beneath the mad imperatives of the Stalinist state. And a black sexual economy
persists in modern America, which no feminist policing has yet succeeded in stamping out. Men
go on taking charge of things, and women go on deferring to the men. Girls still want to be
mothers and to obtain a father for their children; boys still want to impress the other sex with
their prowess and their power. The steps from attraction to consummation may be short, but they
are steps in which the old roles and the old desires hover at the edge of things. Hence nothing is
more interesting to the visiting anthropologist than the antics of American college students: the
girl who, in the midst of some foulmouthed feminist diatribe, suddenly begins to blush; or the
boy who, walking with his girlfriend, puts out an arm to protect her. The sociobiologists tell us
that these gestures are dictated by the species. We should see them, rather, as revelations of the
moral sense. They are the sign that there really is a difference between the masculine and the
feminine, over and above the difference between the male and the female. Without the masculine
and the feminine, indeed, sex loses its meaning. Gender is not just possible, but necessary.
And here, surely, lies our hope for the future. When women forge their own "gender identity," in
the way the feminists recommend, they become unattractive to men—or attractive only as sex
objects, not as individual persons. And when men cease to be gentlemen, they become
unattractive to women. Sexual companionship then goes from the world. All that it needs to save
young people from this predicament is for old-fashioned moralists to steal unobserved past their
feminist guardians and whisper the truth into eager and astonished ears—the truth that gender is
indeed a construct, but one that involves both sexes, acting in mutual support, if it is to be built
successfully. In my experience, young people hear with great sighs of relief that the sexual
revolution may have been a mistake, that women are allowed to be modest, and that men can
make a shot at being gentlemen. And this is what we should expect. If we are free beings, then it
is because, unlike our genes, we can hear the truth and decide what to do about it.