This week I finished reading Peter Hitchens’ (brother of
Christopher) book The Cameron Delusion
(Continuum, 2010; first published as The
Broken Compass, 2009). The book’s main focus is to lament compromise in the
Conservative party in the UK, especially seen, according to Hitchens, in the
rise of David Cameron, and its adopting of positions little different from the
Labor party. There’s also plenty of insightful commentary on other things.
In a chapter on shifting views on sexuality, Hitchens makes
the point that Orwell’s vision of totalitarian government being sexually
repressive in 1984 is less on target
than Huxley’s vision of it exercising control by pandering to meaningless
sensuality in Brave New World. So, he
observes: “Sexual license, narcotic drugs and endless diverting entertainment,
followed by swift and painless euthanasia when the faculties fail, dispense
with the need for the thought police” (p. 101).
Interesting too is his related argument that the 1960s “sexual
revolution” was, in fact, a revolt against real freedom of thought and,
especially, against the orderly worldview of Christianity:
So, the sexual revolution is, by a
great paradox, a revolution against political consciousness, discontent, and
rebellion. The sexual revolutionary climbs over the barricades and straight
into bed with someone he is not married to, and quite possibly someone of the
same sex. He is not seeking the overthrow of the existing order. He is seeking
the existing order’s permission to pursue pleasure at all costs. The idea that
sex is necessarily connected to reproduction and parenthood is repulsive and
shocking to him. He is also engaged in a war against continuity, a rejection of
his parents’ lives, and a rejection of guilt. And guilt, as Sigmund Freud did
so much to show, can most easily be avoided by ensuring that actions previously
viewed as guilty become normal and general.
This is why the sexual insurgent
eventually finds himself ranged against all the outer defenses of Christian civilization—the
canon of literature, classical music, and representational art, traditional
architecture, modest dress, and seemliness of all kinds, restraint in speech,
decorum, and manners in general. All these embody or imply Christian mythology
and Christian ideas about guilt, penitence, redemption, and conscience.
Conscience allied with absolute morality and sustained by religion, is the
source of guilt. This is why, sooner or later, the Western sexual radical is
bound to attack Christianity, because it is his own religion and the basis of
the guilt and self-restraint which he wishes to discard. He may simultaneously
be happy to give sympathy to other religions, but this is because they are
practiced by migrants whom he sees as allies against the monoculture. It is
also because he did not meet these faiths in his childhood or learn them from
his parents, and so does not feel that they bind him as Christianity would, if
he accepted it.
He may take some years to arrive at
this direct anti-God position, since first he will have been busy smashing the
outer fortifications of Christian sexual morality—disapproval of pre-marital
and extra-marital sex, prohibitions on abortion and divorce, misgivings about
homosexuality. But once these are out of the way the inner fastness of
Christian beliefs lies exposed, and open to attack….. (pp. 102-103).
JTR
