An almost unidentifiable force which seeks the destruction of a traditional morality rooted in a belief in the universal, the transcendent and the perennial, is well on its way to achieving its goal.
It wasn't only 'The Great Sexuality Showdown' on TV3 that reminded me that New Zealand is in the midst of a culture war, a kulturkampf as the Germans call it. Every year, we see another piece of traditional thought eroded away.
The Brezhnev doctrine ('what we gain we keep') prevails now in New Zealand, although it has long since died in Russia. Most average New Zealanders seem to have little understanding of the aggressive and revolutionary force that confronts them.
The force is not easy to identify or name. 'Liberalism' is too stale and confusing a term. 'The left' sounds too political and anyway it would only do in a very unsatisfactory way.
We are not talking about a small sectarian entity but rather an aggressive force that keeps on playing offensively against traditional standards. It seeks to overturn the existing order.
Aspects of it are alluded to daily in the press and in private conversation. It revolves around standards in the schools, changing sexual behaviour, music, behaviour in Parliament, increasing divorce, youth suicide and so on. It is not a conspiracy because its goals are not always understood by those who help to advance it in the political arena.
At its cutting edge, it seeks the destruction of traditional morality rooted in a belief in the universal, the transcendent and the perennial. It is well on its way to achieving its goal. It aims to separate learning from discipline, sex from procreation and commitment, to undermine the notion of individual responsibility, to normalise abortion and euthanasia and to abolish the traditional distinction of gender.
Destruction of marriage?
It is at war with the institution of marriage. It has helped to transfer the provider role from the male to the welfare state. It posits that two people of the same sex can be 'married'. By heaping indignation on anyone who disagrees, the cause of disintegration is grandly assisted.
Failure to appreciate the inroads taking place in the culture war is assisted by an apparent inability to think in terms of consequence. The superannuation blowout is likely in the early 21st century and has its origins in the abortion habits of the late 20th century. The fatherlessness of nearly half our children has its roots in the sexual liberation ideology of the 1960s and 70s.
The rapidly increasing use of drugs among the young and the attempts to normalise their use have their beginnings in their self-realisation propaganda of the human autonomy theorists. 'My body is my own property and I can do what I like with it.'
Civilisation's glue
Some home truths need to be shouted from the rooftops. The foundation of human capital is strong family life. It is by means of mutual commitment in marriage, by raising and educating children, that the family is both the producer of human capital and the first investor in every culture.
It is the family that transmits values and virtues. In the truest sense, this is the creation of human capital and the basis of a sound economy. In a family, men and women give of themselves, they make enduring commitments to trust each other and co-operate with those around them. Without this ethical base, a strong economy cannot develop or be sustained. It is the family and its ethical base that is now under open attack.
There is no society known to history or anthropology whose social order has not been based on marriage. The universal deployment of a binding contract to control reproduction and child-rearing reflects wide understanding that societies which lack cohesion cannot long survive. That this is not apparent to many legislators and a liberal media illustrates a wilful blindness.
The family, which is a man and woman bound in a lifelong covenant of marriage, exists for the purposes of the continuation of the human species; the rearing of children; the regulation of sexuality; the provision of mutual support and protection; the creation of an ethical domestic economy; and the maintenance of bonds between the generations. Of course, not all families manage all of these. Nevertheless, that remains the glue that holds civilisation together.
The culture war is now about the reshaping of the family and the consequent reordering of the community. The government structures that rise out of liberal thought are in the process of taking moral authority from the family and giving it to the state. The consequence is that we get a notion of family being thrust upon us similar to the therapeutic one given to us by the American lesbian activist, Roberta Achtenberg: 'A unit of interdependent and interacting persons, related together over time by strong social and emotional bonds and/or by ties of marriage, birth and adoption, whose central purpose is to create, maintain and promote the social, mental, physical and emotional development and well-being of each of its members.'
Central to the kulturkampf is one of the silliest ideas ever to seduce the human mind - the idea of human autonomy. 'I am my own boss and my body is my own property to do with as I like.' This idea is now so prevalent in our society that it has become the basis of liberal morality and the foundation for a late 20th-century notion of tolerance.
Basis of hooliganism
We are now being told that we are beginning to have serious education and identity problems with our young men. There is a key aspect of the growing independence of the individual from cultural and family controls which links it with growing crime and disorder among young men.
That key aspect has been a growing sexual liberation - men's freedom to engage in sexual intercourse without being powerfully restrained by social pressure to become, under the same roof, lifelong monogamous husbands to their sole sexual partners and lifelong fathers to their children.
The progressive release of men from sociological fatherhood, as Malinowshi called it, is only one result of the cultural war, but one of the most critical towards the disintegration of ordered life in an ordered economy.
One of the significant areas in which we have a definite connection between sexual liberation and family life is the potential criminality of young men. According to Norman Dennis in The intervention of permanent poverty, the disjointedness of young men from the controls of family life, which is largely the absence of the father, is the major cause of hooliganism, vandalism and drug use. Indeed, the change of cultural conditions for boys is now a very serious social problem in New Zealand.
It is not an exercise in extravagant suggestion to claim that the decline in marriage, liberal sexual mores and divorce are major factors that shape attitudes of young men in particular and consequently contribute to crime and shape much of our welfare system.
Reprinted from the April 17 1997 issue of New Zealand Herald, Auckland, with permission.
Bruce Logan is Director of the New Zealand Education Department Foundation, a private think-tank on education.
