Shame Is Deader Than Dead

"The author is ending her marriage. Isn't it time you did the same?" So the Atlantic Monthly provocatively introduces its July/August feature "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off." It comes at a propitious moment. This seems to be the week for TMI -- too much information. South Carolina's Gov. Mark Sanford has told more, much more, than we needed to know about his mistress (how he met her, how their relationship ripened), his views on God's laws, on the Appalachian Trail, and on forgiveness.

Why must wayward American public figures stage these auto autos da fe -- these self-immolations on TV? Dignity, which arises from a proper sense of keeping private matters private, is a lost aspiration apparently -- along with so many other virtues, like dignity's companion restraint. Yes, Sanford needed to apologize to the citizens of South Carolina for going AWOL. But as for the messy private details, a simple written statement that he was having marital issues would have sufficed. At least Mrs. Sanford showed some sound judgment by declining to pose next to her straying spouse as he fielded queries about his extramarital activities. But even her statement -- and it goes without saying that she finds herself in this situation unwillingly -- strayed into TMI. She told the world under what circumstances she would consider repairing their union: "I remain willing to forgive Mark completely for his indiscretions and to welcome him back, in time, if he continues to work toward reconciliation with a true spirit of humility and repentance." That's the sort of thing that should be communicated to one person only.

The Atlantic's Sandra Tsing Loh -- not content to cheat on her husband and file for divorce -- compounded the betrayal by writing about it in cringe-inducing detail. Her account begins in the office of the couple's marriage therapist, where Loh recounts the moment she decided she couldn't "work" on her marriage despite having two young sons. "We cried, we rent our hair, we bewailed the fate of our children. And yet at the end of the day ... I would not be able to replace the romantic memory of my fellow transgressor with the more suitable image of my husband, which is what it would take in modern-therapy terms to knit our family's domestic construct back together." Does the whole world need to know that? Do her children? Her children's classmates?

But because Ms. Loh is a journalist, she cannot resist the urge to, in George Will's term, "commit sociology." Since her own divorce, she's begun a "journey of reading, thinking, and listening to what's going on in other 21st-century American families. And along the way, I've begun to wonder, what with all the abject and swallowed misery: Why do we still insist on marriage?" This, bear in mind, comes from the magazine that boldly declared "Dan Quayle Was Right" on its April 1993 cover.

Loh's form of sociology is a sloppy one -- a few quotes from pop psychology texts, a few examples from among her friends and acquaintances -- and she is ready to declare that marriage itself is the problem. "To work, to parent, to housekeep, to be the ones who schedule 'date night,' only to be reprimanded in the home by male kitchen b------, and then, in the bedroom, to be ignored -- it's a bum deal." How far we have come, sisters, from "The Feminine Mystique," when Betty Friedan cried under the lash of domesticity. Today's woman is apparently miserable because her husband is too much of a culinary perfectionist and too inadequate a lover. Maybe. But that's one problem with playing a sociologist in magazines. It's all impressions, not data.

Loh's solutions range from the casually immoral (wives should take lovers without leaving the marriage) to the tribal "Let children between the ages of 1 and 5 be raised in a household of mothers and their female kin. Let the men/husbands/boyfriends come in once or twice a week to build shelves, prepare that bouillabaisse, or provide sex."

There are no solutions to the problems Loh identifies. People will become dissatisfied with their spouses, and they will behave selfishly. But as countless real social scientists have shown -- W. Bradford Wilcox, Sarah McLanahan, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, and David Blankenhorn spring to mind -- marriage remains the most secure arrangement in which to raise healthy children. It also conduces to adult happiness more than any other arrangement.

Ironically, for all her fulminating, Loh hints at the end of her piece that her own selfish quest ended unhappily. "(A)void marriage -- or you too may suffer the emotional pain, the humiliation, and the logistical difficulty, not to mention the expense, of breaking up a long-term union at midlife for something as demonstrably fleeting as love."

How about another solution that is only about 3,000 years old? How about avoiding adultery?

God set the standard for male-female relationships in the garden of Eden, one man and one woman for life. After the fall and the first family's banishment from Eden that standard apparently fell by the wayside, and by the time Abraham came on the scene over 4000 years ago it appears that multiple wives were a mark of a man's wealth and status in society. Whether you believe the Genesis account is history, allegory, or fiction it is evident that the male-female relationship has been difficult if not impossible to maintain throughout all times and all societies in accord with that original high standard without an irrevocable, unbreakable commitment by both parties to stick together through thick and thin until parted by death of one or both parties. That basic family unit is the building block of a sustainable civilized society, and all societies which have not held to that standard, which were practically all nations, tribes, and societies in recorded history, either disintegrated or were conquered by equally immoral or even more immoral tribes or nations, and have passed into history unlamented.

When you look around America today and take note of how our society has devolved morally over the past century and is rapidly disintegrating into utter moral chaos at the pace set by Hollywood and increasingly by our pop-star type politicians, it's not hard to understand why America's glory days are past and the future of our society and our nation is bleak to say the very least. I know many people will say that American society was always like this, but in the past it was kept quiet and out of sight and now it's out in the open. And as a septuagenarian with a reasonably good memory and some familiarity with America's history I realize that there is a considerable degree of truth in that claim. But there can be no credible denial that the vulgar coarsening of our society and the widespread dissolution of the basic family unit that first began to noticeably infect American society in the immediate aftermath of WWII has metastasized exponentially in the last 4 or 5 decades and has produced the most discontented, frustrated, angry, openly and unashamedly immoral 3 or 4 generations of Americans since the first European settlers landed here 4 centuries ago.

This relatively abrupt moral decline and the almost universal acceptance of both homosexual partnerships and serial unmarried cohabitation by "straight" couples as normal, morally permissible relationships does not bode well for America's future IMHO. I am very much afraid that by this time next century the rise and fall of the US as the modern world's foremost military and economic power may be just another lesson in high school history books. OTOH if my understanding of bible prophecy is essentially correct, by then the human race may be living in the 1000 years of peace and prosperity promised to those who endure and survive the terrible 7 year period of global rule by AntiChrist revealed as foretold history written under divine inspiration by the apostle John in the book of the Apocalypse. My current tagline is an excerpt taken from the next to last verse of the New Testament, and that excerpt is also my most fervent prayer and the only hope for the continued existence of the human race.

Like I said, though, even the redeemed struggle:

Gal 5:17 For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want.

My point is that there are the two views of the nature of man. These two views - basically good, or basically flawed and sinful, are THE bases of the dichotomy of worldviews. And the flawed view is biblical, and therefor truthful, and the other is a-biblical, and therefor from the spirit of error.

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