Mary Eberstradt talks with Kathryn Jean Lopez about her book, Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution, and the widespread denial of the damage done by the sexual revolution:
For decades now, sociologists and other experts have built up a library’s worth of evidence about the toll of this human experiment. Yet a great many sophisticated people deny that this record exists and excoriate anyone who so much as points his thumb at it. This is uncannily reminiscent of what happened during the Cold War, when an impressive number of sophisticated people across the West reacted to Communism . . . by attacking anti-Communists rather than 
Communists.
Of course in retrospect, everyone can see that Communism was exactly what the anti-Communists said it was: an experiment with enormous costs. Nobody disputes that anymore, not even all those anti-anti-Communists who spent their days defending or rationalizing the thing. The point is that as it turned out, a lot of sophisticated people were wrong all along about a pretty important issue that turned out in retrospect to be a no-brainer.
That’s where the comparison to denial about the legacy of the sexual revolution comes in. Right now, those who might be called the “anti-anti-liberationists” are running the show. In retrospect, though, they’ll be the losers in this debate, just like the anti-anti-Communists were yesterday, and for the same reason: because the facts aren’t on their side.
I think that evolution is happening already, in fact. Just look at the recent article in the New York Times, all about how being married or unmarried is a decisive factor not only in income inequality — married people are financially better off — but also, the author dares to suggest, in children’s overall well-being.
That kind of thinking in the paper of record represents a real turnaround. It means that the evidence assembled by Charles Murray and W. Bradford Wilcox and other tenacious social scientists about the “marriage gap” has finally started to sink in. And I’m betting there’s more of that to come as the adverse economic consequences of non-traditional family arrangements get more attention. The connections between the decline of the traditional family and the economic woes of Western welfare states are only beginning to be understood, but they’re obviously there — and again, you don’t need to be a flack for Rome to see them. Just reading a little secular social science will do. ...
LOPEZ: Given the seminal event the introduction of the contraceptive pill was, and the ubiquitous nature of contraception in American lives, is turning back the clock, as they say, realistic?
EBERSTADT: The vehemence with which people say that the clock can never be turned back on the sexual revolution is pretty ironic. Just think of all the times you heard that phrase during the debates over the HHS mandate — or the one about not putting the genie back in the bottle, or not ever returning to the 1950s, etc.
All these clichés are shorthand for one word: inevitability. A lot of people for a lot of reasons want to claim that everything about this revolution is now a permanent fact of life, off-limits for contrarian interpretation. And what’s really interesting about that embrace of the idea of inevitability is that history has shown time and again that human beings just don’t operate that way.
As Karl Popper showed in The Poverty of Historicism, history is not, in fact, on the side of movements claiming inevitability for themselves. Just ask the Communists . . . if you can find any. No social movement gets a special dispensation from history, no matter how badly some people might want it to. Human beings are not only moral creatures but also rational ones, at least collectively and over time, and the empirical record about the dark side of the sexual revolution will eventually make a dent. As mentioned, I think it already has made one.
Read the entire interview, "Pill Buzz Kill" on the NRO site.
Comments