Principles of Conservatism: "Lifestyle" as a Substitute for Value-less Justification

 

Over the past few decades, homosexual sex has gone from counterculture to lifestyle to a human right. Is this the inevitable path of modernism or a degeneration of the ideals of society and morality?

The following quote is quite lengthy, but necessary to include the gist of the argument. From the book The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom:

"Life-style" justifies any way of life, as does "value" any opinion.... With our curious mixture of traditions, life-styles are accorded rights, so defense of them is a moral cause, justifying the sweet passions of indignation at the violators of human rights, against whom these tastes, before they became life-styles, were so politically and psychologically defenseless. Now they can call upon all the lovers of human rights throughout the world to join in their defense, for the threat to any group's rights is a threat to them all.... Sex is no longer an activity but a cause. In the past there was a respectable place for marginality, bohemia. But it had to justify its unorthodox practices by its intellectual and artistic achievement. Life-style is so much freer, easier, more authentic and democratic. No attention has to be paid to content.

Life-style was first popularized here to describe and make acceptable the lives of people who do attractive things that are frowned upon by society. It was identical to counterculture. Two great expressions in the American usage, draped in the authority lent by their philosophic genealogy, provided moral warrant for people to live exactly as they please. Counterculture, of course, enjoyed the dignity attaching to culture, and was intended as a reproach to the bourgeois excuse for a culture we see around us. What actually goes on in a counterculture or a life-style whether it is ennobling or debasing-makes no difference. No one is forced to think through his practices. It is impossible to do so. Whatever you are, whoever you are, is the good. All this is testimony to the amazing power, about which Tocqueville speaks, of abstractions in a democratic society. The mere words change everything. It is also a commentary on our moralism. What begins in a search if not precisely for selfish pleasure - historians of the future will not look back on us as a race of hedonists who knew how to "enjoy," in spite of all of our talk about it - then at least for avoidance of and release from suffering or distress, transmogrified into a life-style and a right, becomes the ground of moral superiority. The comfortable, unconstrained life is morality (pages 235-36).

This lengthy passage gives us a brief historical path of sexual license since the 1960s. The problem with the idea of "lifestyle" as a social structure stems from the basic hedonistic and nihilistic basis of its definition. As Bloom points out, lifestyle justifies any way of life, and, applied to sexual choices, validates any actions as acceptable within society. Yet, when sexual license is elevated to the status of a civil or even a human right, and becomes morally superior to societies where sexual desires and actions are controlled, such a society weakens its ability to maintain the family structures necessary to create and successfully raise the next generation.

To elevate sex to the status of a civil or human right also creates a dichotomy between historical morals and society. For example, to justify homosexual practices by instituting them into such fundamental social institutions as marriage, deprives society of its ability to maintain its regulation of the male/female sexual relationship and the possibility of creating children from such a union.

Americans don't completely buy into the lifestyle line. Many understand that sexual preference and subsequent action does not define who a person is. Americans still understand sexual desire and acts, not as a lifestyle choice or as a right, but as a human drive. Sexual drives have always been regulated by society to protect the institutions of marriage and family and to provide an sufficient structure to raise the next generation.

Many Americans also understand the folly to allow the law to redefine marriage in such a way as to validate sexual practice as a civil right, to allow the law to make male and female meaningless within marriage, and to allow the law to institutionalize families which cannot provide the best support to raise the next generation.

Yet, we have allowed the concept of lifestyles as a legitimate social structure, despite the nihilistic nature of the concept. As Broom puts it, "life-styles are accorded rights, so defense of them is a moral cause, justifying the sweet passions of indignation at the violators of human rights." Hence, those who defend against hedonism and nihilism are branded as heretics, in violation of human rights. Proponents of California's Proposition 8 become H8ers and defenders of marriage become bigots and homophobes.

Yet, the question remains: Must we accept "lifestyles" as valid social constructs, or can we reassert the former ideals and understand actions as choices which define what we do but not who we are?