Where is the love? Or, the rantings of a defiant progressive

My reading has taken me in some very interesting directions as of late, some of them fairly introspective. Notable among them was an opinion article by Newsweek’s Lisa Miller, entitled ‘Sexual revolution, part II’ – an article which brought to mind some old issues that seem to keep cropping up for me.

I used to consider myself ‘liberal’; now I prefer ‘progressive’, ‘socialist’ or ‘communitarian’, as I have drifted leftward in my economic views and toward the radical middle in my social ones. It is a common assertion by cynics that ‘progressive’ is just a different way for liberals to call themselves by spinning it in a different way, but I think there is a true difference in the way the word is shaded that alters its meaning. Much as I hate automotive analogies, I think one is appropriate here: where progressives are seeking to get into first gear, I think liberalism is content to be stuck in neutral, while conservatives eagerly seek to try ever-higher reverse gears. The attitudes toward sex highlighted by Lisa Miller’s article illustrate this wonderfully: a conservative group (True Love Revolution) at Harvard is, in ways which are probably best understood as sexist and heterocentric, seeking a throwback to a mythical time in which sexual relationships were simpler and people waited to get married before losing their virginity. And the responses Miller quotes from their liberal political opposition on-campus are merely the tired old lines (as she says) from the 1970’s: what matters is that sexual acts are consensual and that they are safe and STD-free and that women get greater control. It brings to mind the old debates we used to have in the opinion columns of the Mayhem’s Murmurs at Kalamazoo College.

I’m not saying what liberals want isn’t important. People deserve to be physically healthy, safe and respected. But Miller is right about one thing – TLR is close to bringing about an antithesis to liberal thinking which deserves to be considered seriously. You can talk about all of the clinical aspects of sex till you’re blue in the face; you can pass out all the condoms you please and give all the condemnatory speeches you wish about the homophobia and sexism of conservative Christianity, but it’s all incredibly weak tea, impotent when it comes to the central question of why a college student – or anyone – seeks out sex, really. Same reason people turn to religion (one hopes) – and Miller catches onto this well.

I was not a happy person during college. The psychological pressure to be sexually active got to be overwhelming to the point where I was feeling depressed, lonely and combative. I made some incredibly bad decisions and escaped into an ill-considered and ill-fated sexual relationship, with the fallout from which I’m still living to some extent. I cannot speak for my close friend and senior-year roommate, but I got the sense that he wasn’t a particularly happy person either – his troubled relationship to liberalism often boiled closer to the surface than mine did, to the point where he would write rants against the college feminists in the Mayhem’s Murmurs, or take refuge (from my perspective inexplicably) in an increasingly nihilistic philosophy of self-denial.

Of course, I took a similar route. My studies of and fascination with Confucianism, Daoism, German idealism, existentialism and now Quakerism were practically the mirror image of my roommate’s readings of Watts, Tolle and various Chan Buddhist authors. They led me to the conclusion that what college students look for when they are subsumed in this hookup culture, what the college feminists are looking for when they rail against the male portion of the student body in the abstract, what the conservative Christians and TLR are looking for now when they champion their reactionary agenda, is not from a physical desire that can be gratified with one or many one-night stands, or a moral desire that can be gratified with some political achievement, but a deeper desire for self-definition and self-narration that can be gratified only freely by some kind of recognition from society.

Yet, how weak even this neo-Hegelian language sounds! How much more poignant it is when expressed by a master poet and story-teller, whose unfinished tales from an age more civilised than this one, of knights in the service of impossible causes and kings giving up their thrones and toiling in the fields in pursuit of answers from the peasant women with whom they have fallen in love, still have the power to leave us questioning! The severe, troubled young Dane gives us leave to laugh at the frogs who croak in their ponds about how we should have the same attitudes toward sex as we do to food, yet who themselves are content to feast on whatever flies their long, despairing tongues can snare – but only for a short while before he turns his pen on us for our own hypocrisies.

Even Miller stops just short of asking the tough questions. Are we not allowed to look at our present age and ask the same question the Black-Eyed Peas ask: ‘where is the love’? Might not we take issue with the self-flagellation that sublimates itself into hatred of gays and lesbians, just as much as we might take issue with the people perpetuating the ‘hookup culture’ which confuses consent with respect and condoms with intimacy? Much as I may attract the derision of the cynics for using such language as ‘hope’ and ‘progress’, dare we actually hope for true progress in this discussion, or are we doomed to return forever to these tired rearguard culture-war trenches which claim the lives and sanities of so many college students (and others in our society)?