Via About

New research reveals that college freshmen hold increasingly liberal views on key social issues like same-sex marriage and rights for illegal immigrants. But the progressive viewpoints haven’t translated into significantly greater levels of activism or heightened enthusiasm for national politics.

Those findings, published Thursday in an annual survey from the University of California at Los Angeles, paint a complicated election-year portrait of the country’s newest prospective voters. Are they progressive-minded and eager to embrace more-tolerant social views? Are they cynical products of a sour economy and a fractious political era, bent on punishing the establishment by staying home on Election Day? Or are they simply more inclined to favor civic engagement on a local level—volunteering in their communities, say—over national politics?

Or are they all of the above?

The research, done each year by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, along with other recent reports, provides some clarity, but only to a point. Consider these trends: In 1997, the year that UCLA researchers first began asking freshmen for their views on same-sex marriage, slightly more than half of all respondents said they supported it. In the latest survey, that percentage had reached an all-time high of 71 percent. (For more on how students’ views on social issues have changed over time, see related charts.)

Other findings from this year’s survey point to whether students act on those political beliefs.

Ten percent of respondents said they had worked on a local, state, or national campaign during the past year, placing them on the low end of a figure that has fluctuated between 8 and 15 percent over the past four decades.

At a time when angst over student debt and demonstrations linked to the Occupy movement have ignited some campuses, only 6 percent of respondents said they anticipated taking part in student protests while in college. (In the late 1960s, those numbers were, perhaps surprisingly, even lower: In 1968, 5 percent of respondents said they planned to take part in protests. The figure has never topped 9 percent.)

Numbers, of course, tell only part of the story. For every statistic that portends an apathetic future for today’s young voters, there is a student whose behavior augurs something quite different.

“I used to hate politics like crazy,” says Kavita Singh, the founder and lone member—so far—of the Youth for Ron Paul chapter at Southwestern University, in Texas. Growing up in a conservative Indian family in California’s left-leaning Bay Area, Ms. Singh said her view on politics during her early high-school years was simple: “What does it matter?”

“But I eventually I got into it,” she recalls. By the time she arrived at Southwestern in the fall of 2010, Ms. Singh, who is now 19 and majoring in economics, was a self-proclaimed libertarian.

She soon joined the campus’s libertarian group, did a marketing internship for a school-choice organization, and last month worked remotely to register voters for Ron Paul’s campaign in Louisiana. This semester, she is attempting to drum up support for Representative Paul on Southwestern’s tightly knit campus of 1,400 or so students.

In doing so, Ms. Singh has unwittingly acquired a reputation on campus as “the Libertarian.”

“People have been just very curious about me as a person,” she says. “They come up to me and they say, ‘You’re a woman and you’re not white and you’re not a racist or a bigot, so why are you a libertarian? Why do you believe what you believe?”

‘Politics Is Personal’

It’s a question that presidential candidates might well consider as they battle their way toward November. The recent research on freshmen, for starters, could provide hints on how to recapture the youthful vigor that defined the 2008 race.

Most freshmen responding to the UCLA survey will be eligible to vote for the first time in the forthcoming election. And they appear to have different views from arriving students in the past, says John H. Pryor, the report’s lead author

“What might be a more polarizing issue among the general population might not be polarizing for this population,” he says. “So even though more people are espousing these liberal views, they’re not necessarily thinking, ‘OK, I have this liberal view, therefore I’m a liberal.’”

Indeed, many of the hot-button social and political issues the survey asked students about yielded responses that lean liberal. Yet there have been no major shifts in the percentages of students who identify themselves as liberal or conservative.

The proportion who viewed themselves as “liberal” has varied from a high of 38 percent, in 1971 to a low of 19 percent, in 1981; in the newest survey, it was about 28 percent. “Conservative” students, who constitute about 21 percent of the 2011 respondents, have seen their representation fluctuate from 14 percent in the early 1970s to 24 percent in 2006.

Most students, it is clear, see themselves as someplace in between: In the survey’s 45-year history, the largest proportion of students have consistently characterized their views as “middle of the road.” (In the latest survey, 47 percent do.)…

Read it all.

In this moment of economic challenge, it can be difficult to keep our problems in perspective. The scale of the financial crisis and the subsequent recession, the weakness of the recovery, the persistence of high unemployment, and the possibility of yet another shock — this time originating in Europe — have left Americans feeling deeply insecure about their economic prospects. Unfortunately, too many politicians, activists, analysts, and journalists (largely, but not exclusively, on the left) seem determined to feed that insecurity in order to advance an economic agenda badly suited to our actual circumstances. They argue not that a financial crisis pulled the rug out from under our enviably comfortable lives, but rather that our lives were not all that comfortable to begin with. A signal feature of our economy in recent decades, they contend, has been pervasive economic risk — a function not of the ups and downs of the business cycle, but of the very structure of our economic system. According to this view, no American is immune to dreadful economic calamities like income loss, chronic joblessness, unaffordable medical bills, inadequate retirement savings, or crippling debt. Most of us — “the 99%,” to borrow the slogan of the Occupy Wall Street protestors — cannot escape the insecurity fomented by an economy geared to the needs of the wealthy few. Misery is not a marginal risk on the horizon: It is an ever-present danger, and was even before the recession. But compelling though this narrative may be to headline writers, it is fundamentally wrong as a description of America’s economy both before and after the recession. When analyzed correctly, the available data belie the notions that this degree of economic risk pervades American life and that our circumstances today are significantly more precarious than they were in the past. Even as we slog through what are likely to be years of lower-than-normal growth and higher-than-normal unemployment, most Americans will be only marginally worse off than they were in past downturns. The story of pervasive and overwhelming risk is not just inaccurate, it is dangerous to our actual economic prospects. This systematic exaggeration of our economic insecurity saps the confidence of consumers, businesses, and investors — hindering an already sluggish recovery from the Great Recession. It also leads to misdirected policies that are too zealous and too broad, overextending our political and economic systems. The result is that it has become much more difficult to solve the specific problems that do cry out for resolution, and to help those Americans who really have fallen behind. Only by moving beyond this misleading exaggeration, carefully reviewing the realities of economic risk in America, and restoring a sense of calm and perspective to our approach to economic policymaking can we find constructive solutions to our real economic problems. INCOME AND EMPLOYMENTPerhaps the broadest measure of economic insecurity is the risk of losing a job or experiencing a significant drop in income. And the idea that this risk has been increasing dramatically in America over the past few decades has been absolutely central to the narrative of insecurity. It has fed into a false nostalgia for a bygone age of stability, one allegedly supplanted (since at least the 1980s) by an era of uncertainty and displacement. President Obama offered a version of this story in his 2011 State of the Union address:

Many people watching tonight can probably remember a time when finding a good job meant showing up at a nearby factory or a business downtown. You didn’t always need a degree, and your competition was pretty much limited to your neighbors. If you worked hard, chances are you’d have a job for life, with a decent paycheck and good benefits and the occasional promotion. Maybe you’d even have the pride of seeing your kids work at the same company. That world has changed. And for many, the change has been painful. I’ve seen it in the shuttered windows of once booming factories, and the vacant storefronts on once busy Main Streets. I’ve heard it in the frustrations of Americans who’ve seen their paychecks dwindle or their jobs disappear — proud men and women who feel like the rules have been changed in the middle of the game.

The tales of both this fabled golden age and the dramatic rise in the risk of declining incomes and job loss are, to put it mildly, overstated. But this popular story did not originate with President Obama: It has been a common theme of left-leaning scholars and activists for many years. The clearest recent example of this trope may be found in the popular 2006 book The Great Risk Shift, by Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker. Hacker’s fundamental argument was that economic uncertainty has been growing dramatically since the 1970s, leaving America’s broad middle class subject to enormous risk. Using models based on income data, he argued that income volatility tripled between 1974 and 2002; the rise, he claimed, was particularly dramatic during the early part of this period, as volatility in the early 1990s was 3.5 times higher than it had been in the early 1970s. Hacker’s conclusion — that the middle class has, in recent decades, been subjected to horrendous risks and pressures — quickly became the conventional wisdom among many politicians, activists, and commentators. As a result, it has come to define the way many people understand the American economy. But that conclusion turned out to be the product of a serious technical error. Attempting to replicate Hacker’s work in the course of my own research, I discovered that his initial results were highly sensitive to year-to-year changes in the small number of families reporting very low incomes (annual incomes of under $1,000, which must be considered highly suspect). Hacker was forced to revise the figures in the paperback edition of his book. Nevertheless, he again overstated the increase over time by reporting his results as a percentage change in dollars squared (that is, raised to the second power) rather than in dollars and by displaying his results in a chart that stretched out the rise over time. While he still showed an increase in volatility of 95%, my results using the same basic methodology indicated an increase of about 10%. In July 2010, a group led by Hacker published new estimates purporting to show that the fraction of Americans experiencing a large drop in income rose from about 10% in 1985 to 18% in 2009. But the 2009 estimate was a rough projection, and would have been a large increase — up from less than 12% in 2007. Then, in November 2011, an updated report (produced by a reconfigured team of researchers led by Hacker) abandoned the previous year’s estimates and argued that the risk of a large income shock rose from 13% or 14% in 1986 to 19% in 2009. Where did these assertions come from? The team’s 2010 claim was  again based on a failure to adequately address the problem of unreported income in the data. Their November 2011 claim, meanwhile, used a different data set that was much less appropriate for looking at income loss (because it does not identify the same person in different years, does not follow people who move from their homes, and suffers greatly from the problem of unreported income). In fact, the most reliable data regarding income volatility in recent decades (including the data used by Hacker in his early work and in 2010) suggest a great deal of stability when analyzed correctly. The chart below shows the portion of working-age adults who, in any given year, experienced a 25% decline in inflation-adjusted household income (a common definition of a large income drop, and the basis for Hacker’s recent estimates). Viewed over the past four decades, this portion has increased only slightly, even though it has risen and fallen within that period in response to the business cycle…

Read it all.

The massive victory of the Islamist parties in the Egyptian general elections received its official imprimatur last weekend, and the country appeared headed for a major constitutional tussle between the ruling Supreme Military Council and the emergent parliament.

Egypt announced that, after three bouts at the polls and a number of individual run-off elections, the main 498-member lower house of parliament, the People’s Assembly, which convened this week, will have 235 representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood and 121 from the Salafist al-Nour party and its affiliates. Together they will hold 71 percent of the seats—47.18 percent for the Brotherhood and 24.29 percent for al-Nour). The house will contain another ten “moderate” Islamists from the New Center Party. The centrist and traditional al-Wafd Party will have thirty-six members, and the liberal bloc will have thirty-three seats. The “Revolution Continues” party, representing the leaders of the Facebook and Tweeter generation that featured so prominently in the demonstrations that ultimately toppled the old regime, won only 2 percent of the vote.

Given the nature of the gradual democratic takeover of the state by the Muslim Brothers, many observers see the victory of Hamas‚ the Palestinian offshoot of the Brotherhood, in the 2006 Palestinian general elections as the true herald of the revolutionary change in the Egyptian polity (and perhaps of the so-called Arab Spring in general, given its evident Islamist trajectory).

Fresh mass demonstrations are scheduled this week in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, marking the one-year anniversary of the demonstrations that overthrew the regime of Hosni Mubarak, who ruled Egypt since 1981. The demonstrators likely will press the army to relinquish its hold on power and subordinate itself to the popular will, meaning accept parliamentary oversight and control of its budget and operations. But many liberal Egyptians suspect that the Brotherhood and the army have already secretly struck a power-sharing deal that will sideline both the secularist liberals and the al-Nour Salafists. If so, the protests will be symbolic and pro forma and will pass quietly.

At the end of this week, Egypt will hold its first elections for parliament’s upper house, the Shura Council. After these are completed, the two houses are scheduled to set up a committee to formulate the country’s new constitution. The military, headed by General Tantawi, will likely seek to retain its independence from civilian control and possibly its actual control of the state. Elections for the presidency are scheduled for June. The Brotherhood months ago announced that it will not field a candidate from the party ranks—but, given its electoral success, there can be little doubt that it will either eventually put forward a candidate of its own or advance the cause of a straw man of its choosing.

Observers expect the Muslim Brotherhood, which is likely to form a coalition government with the small centrist-secular parties rather than with its Islamist competitors from al-Nour, to focus in the coming months and years on sorting out Egypt’s internal problems—consolidating its hold on power, battling the flight of foreign investors, reducing unemployment, shoring up crumbling infrastructure and reviving foreign tourism. Thus, it probably will forego its traditional foreign-policy agenda of breaking with the West and annulling the 1979 peace treaty with Israel. The Egyptian economy can ill afford the loss of the annual American foreign-aid subsidy of $1.5 billion…

Read it all.

This image has been posted with express written permission. This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

Via About

Via Newsday

This image has been posted with express written permission. This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

I WAS PRESENT in Warsaw, Berlin, Budapest, and Prague in 1989 when non-violent revolutions swept the Communists from power, creating a brand new model of regime change. I stood in Wenceslas Square as hundreds of thousands of people rattled their keys, unleashing an eerie, shimmering sound into the air, chanting, “Your time is up!” I had lived among the Czechs for a decade in the 1970s, and I felt the power of their relief as the hated regime slipped into history.

So, not surprisingly, I was intrigued by the instant media punditry comparing the bloodless revolutions in central Europe with the recent wave of Arab uprisings in the Middle East. Even on television, I could see similarities between Prague 1989 and Cairo 2011: the peacefulness of protesters; the prominent role played by young people; the sparkling displays of public eloquence and wit; the sudden release from fear and the rebirth of civic pride; the infectious jubilation when the regime was finally brought down. But I saw big differences as well.

In 1989, British historian Timothy Garton Ash, having a celebratory beer with Václav Havel, observed that in Poland it had taken ten years to overthrow the system, in Hungary ten months, and in East Germany ten weeks; Czechoslovakia would perhaps take ten days. He was simplifying, of course, yet his remark captured something of the truth of the moment: Soviet-style Communism was a unified system run, with some minor local variations, from Moscow, and its collapse overturned the old Cold War domino theory — the belief that if Communism were not contained militarily it would spread to other countries. The revolutions of 1989 marked the end of an era, and provided an occasion for joy and optimism to everyone who had lived so long in the shadow of nuclear Armageddon.

Even from my armchair in front of the television, I could see that the events in Tahrir Square were charged with a different energy and a different meaning. Without knowing much about the misery Hosni Mubarak had inflicted on his country, I could still feel the enormous, pent-up frustration of protesters who, day after day, pushed back against the police, braving tear gas, truncheons, armoured cars, rubber bullets, and buckshot, not to mention the stones, Molotov cocktails, and bullets unleashed against them by the regime’s thugs and sharpshooters. Hundreds died and many more were injured. The battle of Tahrir Square looked and felt like a real revolution.

Yet the outcome remained far from clear. Mubarak was gone, but he was instantly replaced by an interim military junta that promised to step down after elections later in the year. The military had allowed the revolution to take its course — one of the slogans in Tahrir Square was “The people and the army are one hand!” — but as a governing body it was ham-fisted and slow, and the popular trust it enjoyed at first soon began to fray. The 1989 revolutions had been swift and decisive, their outcomes never really in doubt; Egypt’s revolution appeared to be bogging down, and had succeeded only in comparison with those in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain, where the violence continued unabated.

Meanwhile, less optimistic analogies had begun to surface. Drawing parallels to abortive revolutions that swept through Europe in 1848 implied that the Arab revolts were vulnerable to suppression, at least in the short run. Comparisons with the 1979 revolution in Iran suggested that they could lead to nasty Islamic theocracies across the region. The Communist countries of central Europe all had unified opposition movements that were almost like governments-in-waiting and enjoyed Western support, whereas the Arab Awakening had no such coherence and seemed to make many neighbouring countries wary, even fearful. I could understand why an absolute monarchy like Saudi Arabia might feel threatened, or why Israel might worry about the future of its relationship with a democratic Egypt. But why were so many pundits outside the Middle East worried? And why in Prague, of all places, were those who had been on the front lines in 1989 asking whether the Arabs were ready for democracy? Didn’t we believe, in general, that even an imperfect democracy was better than none? Or had that belief now become so battered that we no longer trusted it?

I wanted to learn more, which is how I found myself in Cairo in March, six weeks to the day after the fall of Mubarak.

TO A NEWCOMER, the Egyptian capital can feel overwhelming — overwhelmingly brown, overwhelmingly dusty, overwhelmingly noisy, and overwhelmingly crowded. During the day, the major roads and elevated highways are jammed with bleating, blaring bumper-to-bumper traffic that appears to obey no known rules. And yet, except in rush hour, vehicles move efficiently. Walking is an adventure, and merely crossing the road (there are no crosswalks and few traffic lights) can seem like an extreme sport. The secret, I discovered, is to be bold: make your intentions clear, step out into the flow of traffic, and wait for the cars to stop, slow down, or flow harmlessly around you as you make your way to the other side alive. This experience holds a lesson: In Egypt, not everything that appears chaotic or dangerous is necessarily chaotic or dangerous. Even in matters as basic as driving habits, there is an unwritten social contract everyone understands.

Two-thirds of Greater Cairo’s population, which is approaching 20 million, live in what are euphemistically called “informal areas,” tracts of densely crowded concrete and brick buildings, some many storeys high, tightly clustered along narrow streets and laneways without regard for plans or building codes or zoning bylaws, often without access to utilities or policing. The people who live and work in these areas are mostly poor, getting by on the equivalent of a few dollars a day. And yet these are not, strictly speaking, slums or ghettos, and the streets feel relatively safe.

In downtown Cairo, which is almost European in spirit and design, the main streets teem with life, especially after dark. Clusters of boisterous young men hang out on the sidewalks, while young women walk by, arm in arm, ignoring them, or pretending to. Most women cover themselves in public, usually with a hijab or head scarf — one of many signs that Islam has made inroads into what was once a more secular society. The amplified calls to prayer that punctuate the city’s din five times a day reinforce this impression. But, as their driving habits demonstrate, Egyptians have an ambiguous relationship with rules, both religious and secular. Many young women wear colourful, outrageously flamboyant hijabs, almost pharaonic in their puffed-up splendour, which seem intended to attract rather than discourage male attention. And while they also observe the diktat against visible flesh, they frequently wear tight-fitting jeans and long-sleeved sweaters that leave little to the imagination. (Sexual harassment is a serious problem in Egypt; I was told that as more women cover themselves, the incidence of assaults has actually increased.)

I heard a joke in Cairo that encapsulated the Egyptian habit of flouting the law: “We pretend to obey the rules, and they pretend to enforce them.” It reminded me of one they told in central Europe before the fall of Communism: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” Put side by side, the two jokes help to explain the differences between the two societies on the cusp of revolution: the anarchic vibrancy of Egypt versus the homogeneous monotony of central Europe.

When the former Polish dissident Adam Michnik contemplated the devastation that remained after decades of Communism, he came up with a memorable metaphor: Communism turned an aquarium of living fish into fish soup, he said. Our challenge is to turn the fish soup back into an aquarium of living fish.

When the Communists took power in Eastern Europe after World War II, they adopted the Soviet model and set about destroying the traditional institutions of civil society. When they were done, virtually nothing was left standing: no private property, no market economy, no independent businesses; the media entirely under state control; the churches, Catholic and Protestant, eviscerated. A single political party called the shots, and a massive security apparatus backed it all up. This was Michnik’s fish soup, and the problem confronting the new leaders after the revolution was how to bring their societies back to life. Yet they faced the future with some important assets: a high literacy rate, no real poverty, and ex-leaders who had not robbed the country blind, mainly because the centrally controlled economy produced little worth stealing (“We pretend to work, and you pretend to pay us”).

Egypt was still a colourful aquarium, despite the efforts of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the country’s first modern military dictator, to make Soviet-style fish soup of it. Anwar al-Sadat, his successor, attempted to remedy Nasser’s excesses by opening up the economy. So, in turn, did Hosni Mubarak, and today the results can be seen everywhere. Upscale Cairo neighbourhoods boast opulent neon malls selling Western clothing, cars, and services; international corporations like FedEx and Vodafone have put down roots; and Tahrir Square’s most prominent commercial landmark is a KFC outlet.

Cairo’s traditional economy seemed vigorous as well. In the narrow streets beyond the downtown core, I saw block after block of tiny workshops and wholesale outlets producing and selling plastic piping, car repair tools, packing materials, belt buckles, shoe parts, picture frames, bolts of cloth, bales of raw cotton, and on and on — all of it supporting a cottage industry economy that apparently operates beyond regulation (“We pretend to obey the rules, and they pretend to enforce them”). Judging from the number of newspapers and magazines, a lively press exists in Cairo, livelier now that censorship has been relaxed and pro-Mubarak editors have been let go. The judiciary, I was told, remains relatively independent, and the universities — once strictly monitored by the government — show signs of rousing themselves to a new, autonomous life: the American University in Cairo has just launched a new periodical called the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, devoting its inaugural issue to “The Arab Revolution.” Scholars at Al-Azhar University, whose pronouncements carry an almost papal authority in the Sunni Muslim world, have been calling on Egypt to establish “a democratic state based on a constitution that satisfies all Egyptians.”…

Read it all.

Americans are in a disagreeable mood. Polls show pessimism about the country’s future at record highs, trust in government at record lows, and a deep distaste for political incumbents of both parties. It is tempting to attribute this discontent to the economy, and surely the jobless rate has much to do with Americans’ disquiet. But more than unemployment troubles America. Voters have been telling pollsters for years, well before the epic economic collapse, that they believe the country is far off track. It is not just that middle- and working-class Americans cannot seem to move ahead or that too many schools are failing. It is not only that we seem persistently unable to face our ruinous budget deficit or reform our ill-designed entitlement system.

Americans increasingly feel there is a profound and widening distance between our most cherished ideals and the reality of our national life. In some fundamental way, Americans believe, the nation is disordered. Barack Obama’s promise to address that disorder — to practice a reformist, even transformative politics — is what got him elected three years ago. Instead, Obama pursued an agenda of government aggrandizement. Americans want that aggrandizement reversed, but they want more. They want to put their country back in order and make society reflect again their deepest moral commitments, to recover a shared sense of belonging and purpose.

We used to have a word to describe the order we long for: justice. The West’s greatest thinkers, no less than its major religious traditions, have insisted again and again on the centrality of justice. “Justice is the end of government,” James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51. “It  is the end of civil society.” Madison was echoing Aristotle, who argued that justice is the purpose of political community. Though today we often think of justice only in reference to crime and punishment, Aristotle understood that there is far more to justice than that: He contended that justice means arranging society in the right way, in accord with how humans are made and meant to live. The just society is one that permits its citizens to exercise their noblest gifts, to reach their highest potentials, to flourish. Thus while all partnerships aim at some good, Aristotle taught, the political partnership “aims at the most authoritative good of all,” at justice.

We no longer think of justice in this manner, partly because for the better part of a century the term has been hijacked by the left. In the last hundred years, justice became oddly synonymous with labor unions and planned economies and then the anti-American radicalism of the 1960s. It is now too often taken to describe egalitarian economics. But the left’s notion of justice has turned out to be both shallow and calamitous. The left’s agenda has not delivered justice, and indeed, it has blinded us to the fact that justice is what we lack.

While liberals advocated their distorted notion of justice, conservatives abandoned the concept altogether, instead emphasizing freedom and independence in contrast to the left’s egalitarianism. Freedom and independence are valuable things, indispensable in fact, but they are worthwhile precisely because they are just — they are right for the human person. There can be no true freedom apart from a just society. And it will no longer do for conservatives to advocate the former without the latter.

Conservatives must do more than promise to downsize government and let each individual go his own way. They must offer a better vision of a better society, a vision of political justice, with an agenda to match. This is how conservatives can speak to the country’s deepest needs, and this is how conservatives can summon the nation again to its highest potential. For if justice is the supreme achievement of a free people, to call Americans to justice is to call them to greatness.

JUSTICE AND GOVERNMENT

To reclaim the quest for justice, conservatives must first clarify for themselves what justice really means. They can start by rejecting the left’s wrongheaded view.

The liberal vision of justice can be traced to the French Revolution, with its cry of liberté, égalité, fraternité. The middle term was the decisive one: The revolutionaries insisted on the absolute equality of citizens as the touchstone of a just society. No distinctions of rank or wealth were to be permitted, in theory anyway, because no such distinctions were natural to man. The revolutionaries distrusted civil society, with its myriad little groups and private associations, as a redoubt of inequality and “unnatural” distinction. Fraternité — brotherhood — was to be achieved instead through the state, which would put every citizen on equal footing and provide a source of common identity. Only then would liberty, too, be possible.

A century later, Karl Marx gave the Jacobins’ égalité a distinctly materialist turn. Human beings are the products of their material conditions, he said; human identity is determined by the means of production. For Marx, an equality of goods and things was the key to bettering mankind.

American liberals are neither Jacobins nor Marxists, but some of the claims of both figure prominently in contemporary liberal thought. For the modern American left, justice is indeed most basically about equality. And equality is about material things. In his famous book A Theory of Justice, Harvard philosophy professor John Rawls contended that each individual is entitled to the same basic goods as every other. New York University philosophy professor Ronald Dworkin, another liberal icon, has similarly argued that a just society will afford its citizens “equality of resources.” When, during the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama told Joe the Plumber that part of government’s job was to “spread the wealth around,” he was reaching for this same egalitarian idea.

But why exactly is every citizen entitled to the same basic level of material well-being? Here modern liberals offer a conventionally 21^st-century answer: Every individual, they say, has the right to be happy. This equal right to happiness, where happiness is understood as individual satisfaction, is the ultimate source of modern liberalism’s commitment to individual equality. Because every person has a right to pursue what brings him pleasure, every person deserves the resources to make that pursuit possible. The business of government, therefore, is to deliver material equality. Liberals champion the state as the agent of equality, the state as the source of community, and the state as the sponsor of individual happiness.

This leftist vision of justice has proved enormously influential — but ultimately empty. Enshrining individual satisfaction as the end goal of life has left our public dialogue myopic and self-centered. It has impoverished our understanding of the common good by suggesting that all we as citizens have in common is the right to pursue our individual ends. In the name of guaranteeing equality, it has fostered dependency. In the name of individual choice, it has hollowed out civil society, replacing voluntary associations with the state.

In short, the left’s view of justice has led directly to our present crisis. Edmund Burke’s verdict on the French revolutionaries in 1790 is a fitting epithet for modern Progressives and liberals: They “are so taken up with their theories of the rights of man, that they have totally forgot his nature.”

If conservatives are to speak to the nation’s longing for a fuller notion of justice, they will have to offer a better and truer understanding of man. They will need to remember the ancients’ dictum that the just society is one in accord with human nature. The liberal account of justice pays virtually no attention to individuals’ uniquely human talents and capacities, but these are precisely the key to justice. Despite the innumerable differences between one individual and another, there is a fairly definite set of activities in which most people say they find deep fulfillment: working, inventing, creating, building, serving, teaching, raising a family. All these pursuits have something in common. They all involve the application of human effort to a sphere of the world in order to improve it. The Biblical tradition calls this “exercising dominion,” as in the opening of Genesis, when God gives humans authority over the created order with the responsibility to tend and care for it. In more secular terms, we might call it governing.

To govern is to exert a guiding influence on something or someone else, to manage or direct or shape things. We usually think of it in a political context, but there is nothing inherently political about governing. It can describe any responsible, constructive exercise of care or authority. And understood in this way, it fairly describes many of man’s highest capacities. When an entrepreneur takes an idea and turns it into a business, he is marshaling his talents to build something new; he is governing. When a composer drafts a concerto, he is applying his gifts to the world to create beauty where it did not exist before; he is governing. When a teacher trains a student or a parent rears a child, he directs the child for the child’s improvement — he governs…

Read it all.

Walking into McCormick Place, Chicago’s half-hangar, half-labyrinth convention center, I looked at the schedule to find that I had just missed “Canadians Do Cremation Right.” The 130th National Funeral Directors Conference, was underway; held each year in a different city, the conference brings together funeral directors from across the country for three days of presentations, trade talk, awards and camaraderie. After shaking off my initial disappointment at having missed the Canadian talk, I scanned the remaining workshops. After passing on “Marketing Your Cemetery: Connecting With Your Community” and “Managing Mass Fatality Situations,” I circled “The Difference Is In The Details,” an embalming workshop.

The small film company I sometimes work for was planning a feature on new trends in funerals, and I had flown out for the weekend to try to meet some of the younger, hipper funeral directors at the conference. One of these was Ryan, a round man with a wide smile and an impeccable hair-part, whose car, he told me, has a bumper sticker that says “Let’s Put The ‘Fun’ Back In Funeral.” He started his career as a funeral director, but had since moved into the lucrative field of “death care industry” consultation, where he works with funeral directors on ways to expand their businesses. In one of our conversations he tells me, “The worst thing I’ve heard a funeral director say is ‘we’ve always done it this way.’” Later, I tell him my plan to attend that evening’s “Funeral Directors Under 40: A Night on the Town” event. Without missing a beat, he lowered his voice and said, “Funeral directors are notoriously heavy drinkers. There will definitely be some hook-ups.”

The funeral industry is in the midst of a transition of titanic proportions. America is secularizing at a rapid pace, with almost 25% of the country describing itself as un-church. Americans, embracing a less religious view of the afterlife, are now asking for a “spiritual” funeral instead of a religious one. And cremation numbers are up. Way up. In liberal, secular states, specifically in the Pacific Northwest, cremation rates have steadily increased to more than half of disposals, up from the low single digits in 1990. The rest of the nation had also experienced steady gains in cremation since 2000 (except in the Bible Belt, where cremation rates remained relatively low). The rate of cremation has skyrocketed as Americans back away from the idea that Jesus will be resurrecting them straight from the grave. And so in the past twenty years, funeral directors have had to transform from presenters of a failed organism, where the sensation of closure is manifest in the presence of the deceased body, to the arbitrators of the meaning of a secular life that has just been reduced to ash. Reflecting this trend, this year’s NFDA conference was, for the first time in its history, held jointly with the Cremation Association of North America (CANA).

Talking with funeral directors at the conference, I began to realize the scope of the crisis spurred by the rise of cremation and its new importance. As one former funeral director said, “If the family wanted a cremation, we’d say ‘That’ll be $595,’ hand them the urn and show them the door. Not anymore though.” The industry is scrambling to find a way to add value-added cremation services to remain solvent.

This tension about how best to innovate was in evidence at the first presentation I attended, titled “How To Step Up Your Game.” The presenter worked for a consulting firm that specialized in business strategies and management—the funeral industry was his particular subject of expertise. He launched into his talk with a story about a recent trip to Disney World with his daughter. While walking through the park, he realized how much the funeral industry could learn from the attraction. At Disney World, every interaction had been scripted and rehearsed, down to the greetings from the custodians. Experiences are controlled. Likewise, he said, every funeral should offer the same experience for everyone, whether cremated or open-casket. If, say, the customer was having an open-casket service with a priest and an organist, there should also be a corresponding service for someone, possibly secular, who has just been cremated. If priests are no longer always present to say platitudes over the dead, funeral directors would have to develop a corresponding basic, secular service to stand in as a reverent farewell. Thus they’d take a much larger role in the memorial, acting more like mainstream event planners and offering such amenities as video tributes, arranging for music and other points of the new-age burial.

“No more outsourcing the healing to ministers, because that isn’t really going to work anymore,” the presenter continued. Religion answered the question of authenticity, the sense that the memorial was genuine and prescribed. The minister, God’s shepherd, was on hand to see the soul to heaven. But in a society that has grown suspicious and distant from religion, this no longer is sufficient. Now it’s up to the funeral directors to provide that sense of authenticity, of closure, a way to deal with the impossibility of understanding death. The presenter continued with a slideshow of forward-looking funeral homes: huge windows with sunlight streaming in, glossy ceramic tables holding both the urn and catered health food—they looked not unlike high-end yoga studios. As he clicked back and forth between a picture of an old-fashioned, stuffy, sunless viewing room, replete with heavy velvet curtains and faux-gold candelabras, to the new, health-club-reminiscent Remembrance Room, it became clear: the funeral industry is being gentrified. I looked around the room. The audience was incredibly diverse, which, was true of the conference overall and which makes sense: every community has its own funeral home, each with its own loyal followings, its own special services that a cross-town rival doesn’t offer. But here they were, being told to act more like Disney World, and everyone was taking notes…

Read it all.

This image has been posted with express written permission. This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

Via Newsday

This image has been posted with express written permission. This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.

That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.

How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? There’s a fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history and sociology of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the American zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century, apportioning blame in two directions. There’s an essentially Northern explanation, focussing on the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and its “reformist” tradition; and a Southern explanation, which sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued by other means. Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern revisionist tract “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” traces two ancestral lines, “from the North, the birthplace of rehabilitative penology, to the South, the fountainhead of subjugationist discipline.” In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes…

Read it all.

A year has passed since liberal America and the liberal opinion class, in particular, went ecstatic over the Arab debut into the modern world. I know that my standing in that class is suspect. So, being a bit flummoxed myself by the not altogether dissimilar developments in the vast expanse from the Maghreb to Mesopotamia, I conquered my doubts and made a slight stab for hope. But I quickly realized that I was wrong and left the celebration. The true-believers are still there, mesmerized by some ideological mirage or preferring to look on the brighter side of things.

For example, Nicholas Kristof found some Muslim Brothers who promised that even Copts and the ancient Coptic Church, among the first of history’s Christian fellowships, have no reason to fear their party’s electoral strength. “Conservative Muslims insisted that the Muslim Brotherhood is non-discriminatory and the perfect home for pious Christians—and a terrific partner for the West.” Yes, he actually wrote this silliness. One 24-year old Salafist he cites went reassuringly specific: “…under Salafi rule, diplomatic relations with Israel would continue unchanged and ties with America would strengthen.” Alas, less than three weeks after Kristof published his daffy attestations, theJerusalem Post reported on an Al-Hayat dispatch saying that the deputy head of the Brotherhood, Rashad Bayoumi, pledged that his movement would not, would never recognize Israel—“This is not an option, whatever the circumstances, we do not recognize Israel at all. It’s an occupying criminal enemy.” What this means is that, more than three decades after Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin signed a more-or-less successful peace treaty, the agreement negotiated by Jimmy Carter might just be submitted to a reckless electorate. At best! And at worst? You figure it out.

Of course, there are some coyer journalists, commentators, and television personalities who have not dallied too long (and certainly not that long) over the democratic prospect in Arab Islam or, for that matter, in the world of Islam in general. The narrative is actually repetitive and, if not repetitive, simply too grim. And if it’s really grim, like in Syria, no reporters are allowed to or no reporters want to risk it. Which is why every story about Syria is datelined Beirut.

A few years back there was a rush of programs by American colleges and universities to set up “international” outlets in Arab countries for their own students and for students from other institutions, both American and foreign. The most successful were situated in the emirates. But even these never reached their numerical goals. As for their intellectual aims, who really knows what they were? But even in the rich little kingdoms, soon to be marbled up with extensions of the Louvre and the Guggenheim, American educational establishments confronted serious practical and conceptual difficulties from the beginning. Already near the outset of these ventures Tamar Lewin wrote in the New York Times Feb 10, 2008 of the unavoidable (and unavoided) challenges they faced. The downward spiral of the regional economies exacerbated these problems. Syracuse, Cornell Medical College, New York University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Michigan, George Mason, and Carnegie Institute of Technology were among those exposed to questions about whether a degree from, for instance, N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi is a degree from N.Y.U. at all. The answer is obvious. Some five years ago, Yale University decided to avoid the problem altogether. It has cooperative research programs all over China and elsewhere. Otherwise, it is an institution in New Haven, Connecticut. Anyway, the Middle East neighborhood is now too agitated for schools to do long-term planning. Just a few Sundays past, an article in the New York Times reported that a host of such programs are canceling. Anyway, Cairo is not Florence. I don’t know which is more interesting. But you can get killed in Egypt—or, as three American college students from Georgetown, Indiana, and Drexel have already learned, at least get yourself arrested for doing nothing. Chalk up one success for American diplomacy: It was able to get the trio released.

(A side thought: Maybe this is my Zionist smugness. But there are no such problems with standards in ties between American institutions of higher education and Israeli ones. Thene plus ultra of this reality is the intimate connection cemented last month by Technion-Israel Institute of Technology (Haifa) and Cornell University (Ithaca, NY). The new institution to be created will be a school of engineering with a two million square foot campus at a $2 billion ultimate cost on Roosevelt Island in the East River of New York City. A very wealthy and imaginative American businessman and philanthropist put up $350 million for the project. He isn’t even Jewish but an Irish-Catholic alumnus of the Cornell School of Hotel Management, no more, no less. Betabeat explained why this development is the envy of many other American institutions. Mayor Bloomberg explained how the undertaking would transform New York and went on to say that he was negotiating with other academic enterprises to take on similar innovative responsibilities. And, yes, Max Blumenthal, self-described “cultural Marxist,” whatever that means, explained in Al-Akhbar how this venture will enhance Israeli imperialism over the Palestinians. The cornerstone for the Technion was laid in Haifa 100 years ago. It opened for classes a decade later. It has been ranked by the usually cited ratings authorities as 15th in the world in the category of computer sciences, 29th in engineering, and 38th among technological universities, more generally. Technion is not alone. The Hebrew University has been rated 57th in the general excellence category by the authoritative survey of Jlao Tong University in Shanghai. Just one more report: The Sciences, a notable scholarly publication, has for the third time rated the Weizmann Institute of Science “as the best place to work” outside a few institutions in the U.S. These are the latest results, and they help explain why no academic boycott of Israeli scholars and scholarship was ever really floated successfully. By the way, no university in an Arab land or in any Muslim country appears on any such list. In what is by now recognized as his simply silly but deeply sycophantic Cairo speech, President Obama saluted Al Azhar University for having “over a thousand years stood as a beacon of Islamic learning.” What it actually represents is spiritual benightedness and religious obscurantism.)

II.

American expectations of the Arabs were always innocent. In the case of this administration, Obama’s delusion extends to non-Arab Muslims, that is, to the Iranians, the Pakistanis, the Afghanis. He cannot imagine that there are fundamental differences between states. But, as even he must have noticed, in many of these circumstances the very idea of compromise is blasphemous. And, given this, there may be temporary lulls between the really nasty confrontations. Basic differences—yes, of course, there are basic differences—persist and flare up unpredictably. Or, as I believe, predictably. Sometimes they call “time out” and simmer.

Where one side governs, and governs cruelly, the other side resents. I suppose this is what we call simmering. Countries that have no satisfying process of systematic mediation turn out to be tyrannies. Despite their ethnic and ideological differences sometimes these regimes try to cover up their weaknesses by forming a union of oppressors with other regimes. One such union was the Baghdad Pact or the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), mobilized by Great Britain at the initiative of the United States. Its real rationale was the Soviet threat. But even such a threat could not bring Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and Turkey together or mobilize popular support. It crumbled slowly through two decades of bloodshed and revolution within the member countries. It seems like centuries ago but the Soviet Union had neutralized the pact. Iraq, a member of CENTO, was for decades an ally of Moscow. The Red Army had divisions all over the Arab world. Iran became the heart of militant Islam against the West but retained hunky-dory relations with Russia both before the fall of Communism and after. And Pakistan? Well, Pakistan does have an army. The question is: Is Pakistan a country? Iraq still has too many armies. Turkey is the only real state left standing.

Another of those unifying fictions was the United Arab Republic or Al-Gumhuriyah al-Arabiyah al-Muttahidah, this one being a consolidation of Egypt and Syria with failed ambitions to consolidate Iraq within it. It did include North Yemen which no longer exists. The old question returns: Does Yemen itself exist? It may have a president…or it may not. He has resigned. Or has he? He has been given asylum in America. But he’s not taking it. He may not be the most brutal Arab leader of the age: That honor belongs to Bashar Assad. But, now that Qaddafi is dead, he is the nuttiest. If bombs go off in Yemen, someone does want it. Actually, too many forces want it. It is in a state of perpetual war but over no resources and a fractured population: Shia and Sunni and tribal loyalties that are dysfunctional and bloody. (It once had a Jewish king …15 centuries ago. There are no Jews now, all of them having immigrated to Israel.)

Yet the U.A.E. was the real joke. United? The pretense of “union” intensified the cross-border hatreds while it did nothing to soften antagonisms that were always festering within the countries that had, so to speak, signed up. At its core the staging of a pan-national federation was incompatible with the deepest presence of the religion of Islam. In fact, whether it was civil Arab patriotism in the middle of the nineteenth century on the European model of 1848 or Arab chauvinism in the twentieth, there were always prominent Christians in the movement, many historians argue, to ward off Muslim fanaticism. In places like Baghdad, there were also Jews who added a certain cosmopolitanism to the idea of an Arab nation. In any case, the founder of the anti-religious Ba’ath movement, Michel Aflaq, was Greek Orthodox. The Christians of Syria are fundamentally aligned with the relatively secular Assad regime against the country’s Sunnis who are at the core of the revolt.

When the Palestinians were finally roused from their slumber it was Christians who did much of the rousing. Greek Orthodox George Antonius’s book, The Arab Awakening,was a harbinger of falsehoods to come, both unreliable and instructive for the survival of its unreliabilities. And it is on many college course reading lists nonetheless. Moreover, the literal founders of the Palestinian national movement and terrorists besides, were George Habash, another Greek Orthodox from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Najef Hawatmeh, a Catholic from the (Marxist) Democratic Front (also) for the Liberation of Palestine. Surely, you recall—or have been told about—the airplane hijackings, the car bombs, and the sheer slaughter carried out by these Christian idealists against the Jews, in some great measure to preserve their credibility as Arabs among the Muslims. There is a litany of these Christians: the Roman Catholic bishop Hilarion Cappuci, Leila Khalid, and then Hanan Ashrawi, inamorata of Peter Jennings who from his debut at the Munich Olympics as a television evangelist for the Palestinians, for the Palestinian terrorists, really, couldn’t say a neutral word about Israel. There are no more Christian headliners in the Palestinian movement because there are almost no Christians still in the land. No, that’s not right. Professor Ashrawi is trotted out in emergencies when smooth, heavily accented, English is required to disguise illogic and falsehood. Anyway, don’t be fooled: Most of the Christians at Christmas mass in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity were diplomats, NGO staffers and journalists, foreigners, of course. Mohammad Abbas also came to greet the almost unbelievably diminished number of those who worship at the Cross in the city where Jesus was born….

Read it all.

Adulterers and prostitutes could be executed and women were agreed to be more libidinous than men – then in the 18th century attitudes to sex underwent an extraordinary change

We believe in sexual freedom. We take it for granted that consenting men and women have the right to do what they like with their bodies. Sex is everywhere in our culture. We love to think and talk about it; we devour news about celebrities’ affairs; we produce and consume pornography on an unprecedented scale. We think it wrong that in other cultures its discussion is censured, people suffer for their sexual orientation, women are treated as second-class citizens, or adulterers are put to death.

Yet a few centuries ago, our own society was like this too. In the 1600s people were still being executed for adultery in England, Scotland and north America, and across Europe. Everywhere in the west, sex outside marriage was illegal, and the church, the state and ordinary people devoted huge efforts to hunting it down and punishing it. This was a central feature of Christian society, one that had grown steadily in importance since late antiquity. So how and when did our culture change so strikingly? Where does our current outlook come from? The answers lie in one of the great untold stories about the creation of our modern condition.

When I stumbled on the subject, more than a decade ago, I could not believe that such a huge transformation had not been properly understood. But the more I pursued it, the more amazing material I uncovered: the first sexual revolution can be traced in some of the greatest works of literature, art and philosophy ever produced – the novels of Henry Fielding and Jane Austen, the pictures of Reynolds and Hogarth, the writings of Adam Smith, David Hume and John Stuart Mill. And it was played out in the lives of tens of thousands of ordinary men and women, otherwise unnoticed by history, whose trials and punishments for illicit sex are preserved in unpublished judicial records. Most startling of all were my discoveries of private writings, such as the diary of the randy Dutch embassy clerk Lodewijk van der Saan, posted to London in the 1690s; the emotional letters sent to newspapers by countless hopeful and disappointed lovers; and the piles of manuscripts about sexual freedom composed by the great philosopher Jeremy Bentham but left unpublished, to this day, by his literary executors. Once noticed, the effects of this revolution in attitudes and behaviour can be seen everywhere when looking at the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. It was one of the key shifts from the pre-modern to the modern world.

Since the dawn of history, every civilisation had punished sexual immorality. The law codes of the Anglo-Saxon kings of England treated women as chattels, but they also forbade married men to fornicate with their slaves, and ordered that adulteresses be publicly disgraced, lose their goods and have their ears and noses cut off. Such severity reflected the Christian church’s view of sex as a dangerously polluting force, as well as the patriarchal commonplace that women were more lustful than men and liable to lead them astray. By the later middle ages, it was common in places such as London, Bristol and Gloucester for convicted prostitutes, bawds, fornicators and adulterers to be subjected to elaborate ritual punishments: to have their hair shaved off or to be dressed in especially degrading outfits, severely whipped, displayed in a pillory or public cage, paraded around for public humiliation and expelled for ever from the community.

The reformation brought a further hardening of attitudes. The most fervent Protestants campaigned vigorously to reinstate the biblical death penalty for adultery and other sexual crimes. Wherever Puritan fundamentalists gained power, they pursued this goal – in Geneva and Bohemia, in Scotland, in the colonies of New England and in England itself. After the Puritans had led the parliamentary side to victory in the English civil war, executed the King and abolished the monarchy, they passed the Adultery Act of 1650. Henceforth, adulterers and incorrigible fornicators and brothel-keepers were simply to be executed, as sodomites and bigamists already were.

Of course, sexual discipline was never perfect. Men and women constantly gave way to temptation – and then had to be flogged, imprisoned, fined and shamed to reform them. Many others, especially the wealthy and powerful, escaped punishment. As was the case with other crimes, the full rigour of the law was never uniformly or consistently applied. All the same, sexual discipline was a central facet of pre-modern western society, and its unceasing promotion had a profound effect on ordinary men and women. Most people internalised its principles deeply and participated in the disciplining of others. There was no coherent philosophy of sexual liberty, no way of conceiving of a society without moral policing. It seemed obvious that illicit sex had to be combated because it angered God, prevented salvation, damaged personal relations and undermined social order. Sex was emphatically not a private affair.

So pervasive was this ideology that even those who paid with their lives for defying it could not escape its hold over their minds and actions. When the Massachusetts settler James Britton fell ill in the winter of 1644, he became gripped by a “fearful horror of conscience” that this was God’s punishment on him for his past sins. So he publicly confessed that once, after a night of heavy drinking, he had tried (but failed) to have sex with a young bride, Mary Latham. Though she now lived far away, in Plymouth colony, the magistrates there were alerted. She was found, arrested and brought back, across the icy landscape, to stand trial in Boston. When, despite her denial that they had actually had sex, she was convicted of adultery, she broke down, confessed it was true, “proved very penitent, and had deep apprehension of the foulness of her sin … and was willing to die in satisfaction to justice”. On 21 March, a fortnight after her sentence, she was taken to the public scaffold. Britton was executed alongside her; he, too, “died very penitently”. In the shadow of the gallows, Latham addressed the assembled crowds, exhorting other young women to be warned by her example, and again proclaiming her abhorrence and penitence for her terrible crime against God and society. Then she was hanged. She was 18 years old.

That is the world we have left behind. Over the following century and a half it was transformed by a great revolution that laid the ground for the sexual culture of the 19th and 20th centuries, and of our own day….

Read it all.

This image has been posted with express written permission. This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

Via TribLive