Aladin’s lamp or Pandora’s box? Have we recognized how much is at stake as we enter the new reality of “sexual liberation?” We Americans are likely to view any expansion of rights as both overdue and part of putting things back in place. Our State of Nature view sees human nature as a package of potentials that will flourish once they have been liberated from the suppressions of governments. As innate forces, they are somehow intitled to liberation if people are to become “true to their nature,” as “Creation intended,” as “fully realized.”
It is clearly true that sexual desire is more central to our biology than many other urges and desires. We did not populate a planet by monastic contemplation. And how compelling is the origin story of the myth of the Greek-Trojan conflict? How important was sex to the spread and maintenance of slavery, a nearly universal component of ancient civilizations.
If it is the gift of the Genie within the lamp, then our eagerness to make wishes should stand in both the shadow of the rule of three and the aftermath of wishes fulfilled. The Aladin story is one of the strongest of all warnings about the peril of unintended consequences.
And if it is related to the “reveal” of Pandora, the negative consequences are, practically from the start, intended.
I, for one, have over a lifetime been grateful to the liberation agenda. It has been more the general appreciation of freedom, the crossing of boundaries in science, art and social order, than the personal satisfaction of individual desire. I have seen it as “making the right bet” on the future.
But should there have been more caution flags along the way? We occupy so many niches of authority and responsibility. We enter the citizenship of the tribe in many shapes and forms of agency and obligation. Our lives entangle with each other in many roles and stories.
Too often the “green lights” of opportunity are a reach too far, an extension of selfishness too great, an invitation for satisfactions too immediate and too shallow.
We, who have championed liberation should not be surprised to find that our freedom was not unconditional and that others were not as charitable as we imagined.
I am deliberately not signaling out any particular sexual freedom. We are still drawing lines, and line drawing, and particularly line enforcing, are always opportunities for partisan advantage or demagoguery. Any occasion to demonize an“other” has been throughout history the opportunity for scapegoating. From every political bulwark we hear the cry, “release the witch-hunters.” No public square is without the ashes of past fires.
And Bonhoeffer was right, once they come for “them,” you are not safe in turn. So what is my hope for the future? What can I contribute to the story of lamp and box?
Only this.
Grow “our children” in strength of character and resolve. They must have new freedoms and so with the solemn, dread, necessity of maturity, new obligations to others and new bindings on themselves.