Thursday, November 12, 2009

The End of Romance?

The decline of romance in American culture stems from the left's promotion of the value of equality between the sexes. The promulgation of equality, especially under the guise of political correctness, has led the left to wage war on romantic love.

As part of its war on romantic love, the left has assaulted masculinity. Leftists hate masculinity because they see it as reflective of an oppressive hierarchy. Masculinity is dominant, but this is due to biology and not sociology; it is quixotic to seek to condition men to be like women in the name of equality. It is wiser to teach men virtues such as chivalry, which has recognized men's physical dominance and taught men to treat women with gentleness and respect.

It is often claimed by the left that chivalry is dead. Why would the left want to kill it? Because chivalry attempts to bring out men's most noble instincts; this has been mocked by the left as early as Don Quixote, though the modern left lacks the subtlety and ironic introspection of Cervantes.

But the main reason for the decline of romance is the left's sowing of discord between the sexes. The left does this because exclusivity in one's love life is a barrier to the progressive goal of universalizing love. But their drive to redirect love from individuals to the community renders the human instinct of sexual love and love for one's children meaningless. Romance has thus been sacrificed on the monolith of political correctness and equality between the sexes. Children have been commandeered by the state to be molded as political elites see fit. This leads non-coincidentally to social stasis; this is due to the leftist agenda's clash with human nature.

The Greeks were thus wise when they categorized their love in terms of eros or sexual love; philia or friendship, which is distinguished as being among equals; storge, or the affection that parents feel for their children; and agape, which is a general feeling of love - such as for mankind. This rightly distinguishes between different kinds of love.

Equality necessarily destroys the inherent differences between people and equivocates morality. It is thus an anti-rational value because it elides differences and effectively dumbs people down, since rationality is the human faculty that allows us to distinguish and make judgments.

Of course men and women are different and men should act accordingly. An aggressive man should not treat his wife like his bro and an effeminate man should not chat with his wife like they are BFFs sitting on a couch on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

Yet the left's assault on masculinity is relentless. Masculinity is under assault by leftists supposedly because of their assertion that it is inherently the cause of a slew of social problems, including violence and war. The United States has been a bastion for virile masculinity in the Western world. Non-coincidentally, the assault on masculinity in America necessarily entails a few things: the transforming of the country into a sissy fairy factory, weakening our national defense; and along with the political program of feminism, the deterioration of sexual relations. Far from being a random aspect of modernity, the end of chivalry and romance in our culture is a key component of understanding our national decline.

In regards to the problem of emasculation in our culture, we see it with the blame of violent movies, sports, and video games for all manner of tragic acts of brutality. The massacre at Columbine, for example, was blamed on the sick puppies' watching of The Matrix. Dodgeball and tackle football have been banned from some school playgrounds and replaced with supposedly harmless games where there are no winners and losers. Video games like Mortal Kombat have been blamed for numerous fatalities. The eradication of competition and all hints of violence is a goal the leftists seek not merely for the chimera of perpetual peace, but also because it neuters America. To explain this would require a long discussion of international relations and so we move on to the more subtle effects of the leftist program on sexual relations.

The problems with sexual relations in this country are numerous: teenage promiscuity, which is encouraged by "sex-ed" programs in schools as young as kindergarten; the acceptance and even encouragement of abortion on the left; the disrespect of women in entertainment culture; and the promulgation of Internet pornography, which demystifies sex and turns it into a purely carnal act (no wonder a college had recently decided to screen pornography on its campus). The combination is deadly - creating a culture of bonobo-like sexual promiscuity and the ensuing erection of thousands of abortion mills; this lowers the birth rate, assaults Christianity and humanism, and promotes a culture of death - a veritable cornucopia of lefty goodness. So how did we get to this point?

The first cause is the sexual revolution, which was the initial period of leftist dominance in popular culture. This era sowed the seeds of feminism (its own pathology to be explained elsewhere) a manifestly political agenda that foments discord between the sexes.

A second cause is the reinforcement of bizarre sexual relations in mass culture; promiscuity is normalized and pitched to children in TV shows and reinforced in public education (this has the additional virtue of promoting rebellion against parents, as Theodore Adorno recognized); but the distortion of sexual relations is best illustrated by the cultural medium of music.

Music is a pivotal front in the war on romance; it is one of the most subtle forms of subversion because it eludes rationality. The repetition of songs endlessly until they wear thin and are replaced by novel ones, never to be heard again, is consistent with the leftist program. According to critical theory, the mass reproduction of art demystifies the subject and erodes the "aura" surrounding it. This is one reason for the endless stream of sappy love songs since the 1960s to the point where the love song is an absurd cliche. (Listen to a love song of the 1950s and compare it to one of the 1980s for an illustration of this effect.)

This erosion of romantic love through music has bled over into an all out assault on sexual relations. The perverse value of equality and the associated phenomenon of identity politics excuses the the sexual denigration of women in rap music because of the left's bizarre notion of racial and sexual equality (rather than individual rights). Equality in the leftist's mind means that both blacks and women are excused for their bad behavior due to their intrinsic status as victims of white males. This is the case whether the issue is the demeaning of women by blacks or even the castration of a man; we can thus understand why feminists cheered Lorena Bobbitt's castration of an abusive man in his sleep. There are better ways to deal with abusive men; like leaving them, or better yet, teaching men to be gentle and respectful to women when at a young age.

The consequence of the progressives' leveling of ethics under the rubric of moral relativism is not harmony but rather social destruction. So defeat the leftist agenda: open the door for the next woman you meet. But be sure to protect your testicles.

9 comments:

Richard Thornton said...

Where do you come up with this bullshit?

Anonymous said...

Either argue a point or shut up. If I told you Adorno and Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and the seminal book "The Dialectic of the Enlightenment" -would that mean anything to you? Thought not.

Anyway, I am still thinking about this thesis on the level of analytical philosophy. If you had anything to add on this, I'd love for you to enlighten me.

Richard Thornton said...

I prefer reading Bird, Stewart & Lightfoot.

Nora said...

Interesting piece. You are right, of course and the only ones who would dispute it are women and men who haven't any understanding of what it is to be a man. I fear so many of our boys, raised by single mothers grow up with no Earthly idea about how to be a man. The best mother in the world cannot show a boy how to be a man. My husband and I have raised our sons to be chivalrous and it is alarming how many people think my boys are spectacular! I have spoken to mothers who think nothing of having their daughters pay for themselves on dates! I always told my sons, if you can't pay for the date, you don't go on the date! When I was growing up, almost all boys behaved as my boys do. Unfortunately, in today's culture boys who are not taught well, either become hyper-masculine, as seen in rap videos and gangs or are metro-sexual men who look and behave quite like many women.

Richard Thornton said...

I like to go to the Blue Note; Does that make me a "metro-sexual"?

Nora said...

Richard,
I think you are much more Peter Pan than metro-sexual but it is something you can aspire to, I suppose.

Richard Thornton said...

and you are a neo-con Jew who wants to drive U.S. foreign policy through the ass of Israel into the mouth of the Arab world.

Lemming Master said...

Thank you for being such a useful idiot. We appreciate it.

Richard Thornton said...

Maybe we could do lunch?