So I was watching The John Stossel Show this morning, which can throw together an interesting mix of commentators not normally seen on other networks, and the discussion turned to the revolution in personal expression, how there are few restrictions anymore on how one defines oneself: racially, socially, sexually, professionally.
Nick Gillespie, of Reason magazine, and an anthropologist whose name escapes me argued that this “freedom” was all to the good because it has made us as a society more tolerant, more accepting, and more creative.
Gone are the days when social roles were assigned, when you more or less had to do whatever it was your father and grandfather did or believe what they believed, when classes were rigidly defined and virtually unbreachable, and women’s duties especially were so tightly scripted that they made the ladies even of Mad Men look like Oprah, Arianna, and Maggie Thatcher.
As the conversation progressed, Lady Gaga, of course, was hauled out as Exhibit A in the case for polymorphous plenitude and its privileges. Who cares what her sexuality is, said Gillespie, it’s beside the point. (The point being, I guess, how talented she is. Or not.)
So all this “variety” was hailed as essentially American, an almost predetermined trajectory of the 18th century’s big bang of personal freedom. And as for all the hand-wringing about the end of civilization and destruction of the family, well, civilization is always just about to end when some people are confronted with social change, and instead of being destroyed, new kinds of families are being formed. Or not. Which again is the point: gone are the prescriptions that absolutely had to be filled.
To all of the above I say:
That we have become more tolerant and accepting of people of different races and ethnicities, recognizing our common humanity, is all to the good. That we are not locked in fixed economic classes, in thrall to a liege lord or even a company town, relatively free to employ our gifts and pursue our individual vocations, is no small thing and not to be taken for granted.
And who doesn’t want to break free from some of the quite arbitrary constraints and “accidents” of birth. I’m convinced that a deep-seated yearning for a second chance, a second life, a grand do-over, a real makeover, is no accident.
But. When a young person is presented with the idea that all definitions are elastic, that tradition is just another word for trapped, that roles are assumed and cast off like ratty T-shirts, that you can be a boy today and a girl tomorrow or a nerd or a thug or a nihilist or a Buddhist or a pothead or a neuroscientist — that you can be literally anything today and something else tomorrow, and that no abiding meaning should be attached to any of it, well, before long it dawns on you that you are essentially — nothing. Read the rest of this entry »
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I agree wholeheartedly, not only as a Christian, but as an NYU alum. After all, this debate took place at New York University. In Green-which Village. In Manhattan. Among college students.
