Ian Boyne

The Director General of the Planning Institute of Jamaica worries about the fact that 75 per cent of all pregnancies in the age-group 15-24 are unplanned, and the Children's Advocate wants a revision of legislation to punish underage teenaged girls who engage in consensual intercourse.Meanwhile, Chief Epidemiologist Dr. Peter Figueroa is alarmed at the rise in HIV/AIDS, teenage pregnancy and carnal abuse.

Sex is a big issue and has enormous social consequences here and abroad. But the issue is much deeper than many public officials and public commentators realise. Opposition Leader Bruce Golding, however, is on to something. He first touched on the issue in his Budget presentation when, under the heading 'Behavioural dysfunctionalities: Urgent Need for Resocialisation', he made the point that unlike when he was growing up, the children and young people today no longer know the difference between right and wrong.

"They were never socialised that way. And therefore, as concerned as we must be to see the vicious manifestation of this social decay facing us down: the unwanted pregnancies, the rape and carnal abuse, the abuse of our women and children," we should not be surprised.

Profound

Golding went on to say that, "All of us leaned on the rules when we were growing up. Some bent the rules, others broke them. But even when you broke the rules you knew you were doing something wrong and you hoped that you would be lucky enough to get away with it."

Golding picked up his thesis last week in his address at the peace conference at the Jamaican Conference Centre, but no media house saw it fit to report his profound philosophical point.

Speaking to a cross-section of people, he said that what we are today defining as "deviant behaviour" is not seen as deviant behaviour at all by the deviants. They see their behaviour as a challenge to the old, outdated order, and quite legitimate. We are not speaking the same moral language, Golding was saying.We are reading out of two radically different philosophical grammar books and, therefore, communication is really impossible.

Listen to the street prostitutes who are interviewed in the media. Some middle-class persons on Beverley Anderson Manley's Today show seemed stunned recently when a forthright lady of the night proudly proclaimed thatshe had no sense of shame or guilt over what she was doing. When even a sympathetic feminist was suggesting that she, a victim of economic and social oppression, might be really suffering some remorse, she brushed that aside. When a liberal pastor asked her how she felt about how she was viewed by the society, she made a memorable statement:

"I can't wait till people finish laughing before I start to live my life." Argument done. Liberal, secular Western society has not yet grasped the implications of the radical, moral and philosophical shifts which have taken place in the culture.

Appeals like those of Planning Institute boss, Dr. Wesley Hughes, to employ "strategies having to do with the family, schools, churches and non-governmental organisations" represent a futile spitting in the wind. We pay too little attention to philosophy and ideology and so we cannot understand the phenomena we see all around us (Wesley Hughes excepting). Without a philosophical compass we cannot make sense of our everyday reality.

All the heated debate about homosexuality, gay marriage and abortion, the rise in divorce, infidelity, carnal abuse and incest cannot legitimately take place

outside of the context of moral philosophy and epistemology.

"The central difficulty of liberal democratic societies," says Robert Goldwin in his book, Civility and Citizenship is this: "There is little or nothing in the doctrines of liberalism or democracy that has to do with public propriety... The principles of duty, honour public service, sacrifice, respect for elders, respect for authority, all have their sources in other times, other regimes, other ways of thinking about civil society." In other words, we are living in a time warp.

Sexual deviancy

You cannot throw out religion - theistic or civil - and scorn ideology while privileging individual autonomy and still speak solemnly about the evils of incest, carnal abuse or sexual infidelity. Goldwin points out that as much as it is common to decry certain things such as drug abuse, divorce, child sexual abuse, private and public corruption, "liberal democracy does not have the teachings to sustain these older, foreign principles and so we see disruptions for which we seem to have no remedies."

What Golding has labeled "behavoural dysfunctionalities" are systemic to the type of hedonistic, nihilistic culture we have in the West. It is not incidental or peripheral.

"In a rights-based society, the individual comes first, not the community. The rights of the individual are powerful, masterful and primary". That is why marriage is so fragile, infidelity so high, relationships so fickle and what traditionalists deem "sexual deviancy" is increasing.

In an essay in the philosophical journal, Animus (vol.6, 2001) Professor F.L. Jackson says, "the freedom of the individual is modernity's absolute." Renowned philosopher Charles Taylor talks about the morality of the inner-self or the "the moral contract with ourselves".

Going back to Jackson's essay, Freedom and the Tie that Binds: Marriage as An Ethical Institution, he says, "the authority of the institution of marriage would seem especially compromised by an ethics wherein individual freedom preempts every other basis of human compact."

So, it is no wonder that one in every two marriages in the United States ends in divorce or that in Jamaica, as recently reported in the Sunday Gleaner, there was a 30 per cent increase in divorce between 1996 and 2005, and a decline in the number of marriages of nearly 9,000 in the same period.

Note further this point by Professor Jackson: "Ethically, radical individual freedom yields the principle that one has an absolute right to choose, indifferent to whether what is actually chosen is judged good or evil. This principle is devastating when applied to social and ethical institutions since it suggests that these are tolerable only when they are answerable to individuals and exist solely to advance their rights, interests and advantages."

Dimwitted fools

So, when we are busy preaching thevirtue of law and order, respect for school, church and political institutions, etc. many are asking, "who gives you the right to dictate morals and values to us?" And liberal society cannot really give a convincing answer.

Recently, I watched an episode of the irreverent Penn and Teller which mocked hilariously the matter of abstinence before marriage. Even I as a Christian was laughing out loud at how Christians were projected as dim-witted fools with backward ideas. The guys made Christians' views on sex look really stupid and laughable.

Then right after that MSNBC was airing its gripping To Catch a Predator. The sting operation is set up and all these perverts are seen walking excitedly into the home of the 13-year-old girl to carry out their fantasies after having met online. They come in, the girl disappears to come back but instead who comes out is the Dateline journalist who begins to read lurid sex descriptions from Internet chatline. Grown men and young guys are then made to look really dirty and slimy to want to have sex with a 13 or 14-year old, depending on what the decoy claimed in the set-up.

The journalist asks the fellows: "Don't you know this is against the law? Are you not ashamed to be coming out here to have sex with a 14-year-old girl?" The guys really look dejected and remorseful. Some confess that they have an uncontrollable and sick obsession with young girls and that they really need help.

But I ask myself: By what objective moral authority is sex with a 14-year old deemed necessarily immoral and degrading, if we throw out religion or an objective moral order? Is anyone saying that no 14-year-old could possibly have the reasoning ability to make a decision for consensual sex with a 22-year-old or a 45-year-old? Some guys (usually guys) get together and make some laws. Different countries have different and arbitrary age limits. What if some pervert says he is not bound by what fallible men decree?

When you throw out objective standards of morality and throw out religion and ideology, how do you ground moral rules? One man's pervert is another man's liberated soul. Pornography is seen as nasty in some conservative quarters but it is a US$50 billion industry. The Gleaner last week proudly displayed a smiling, seemingly happy lesbian couple who was married in a Jamaican hotel with fireworks. Once that would be deemed too disgraceful to be published. But now it is proudly displayed.

Repulsive

Secular liberal society has no basis on which to rule matters immoral except by majoritarian consent, but not even that is accepted. Ask the gays who are always in the national minority in any country if they deem majoritarian morality as necessarily binding. If the major reason for grounding homosexuality ethically is on the basis of sexual impulses and feelings, then who says a father cannot genuinely share sexual love with his consenting teenaged or adult daughter or a mother with her adult son or a lover with his stepdaughter? I know the very thought is repulsive (and I find it so, too, but I am a Christian ideologue so I am permitted to, but not the hedonistic secularist).

I remember once reading Mark Wignall, the militant agnostic and anti-church critic, express disgust and amazement at the decadence of a young schoolboy who was peeping under his live-in lover's dress while they were driving. How morality has declined, he moaned. And I wondered: Why is Mark as a sexual libertine blowing the whistle on this young man who was lusting after what he is enjoying? Is lusting against the law? It is according to Jesus' law, but Mark rejects that.

Hedonistic, post-Christian society cannot eat its cake and have it. What is more likely is that it will be eaten away by moral decay.

Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist who may be reached at ianboyne1@yahoo.com.