Happy Days Were Here Again Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist

A while ago, I advocated licensing drug sales alongside a national educational effort to persuade potential users, on purely utilitarian grounds, that, on the whole, they were better off not amputating mind and body in exchange for quick nervous highs. None of the reactions to my suggestion surprised me, save one, by Dr. Mitchell Rosenthal. He is the head of Phoenix House, and he said that drugs should continue to be illegal, pending the day when they were universally shunned. He explained that the only way to lick marijuana, targeted merely as an example, was to engender “societal disapproval” and bring on “informal social sanctions” of a kind that would make marijuana simply not accepted. His objective is nothing less than to “revive an ethos.” Make drug-taking ... “sinful”? What exactly is that?

The development of an ethos can work, and two examples come to mind. I do not tire of recalling the distinguished and scholarly Bostonian who told me one day at lunch that he would leave the table if he heard uttered any of the casual anti-Semitic remarks he routinely had heard uttered as a boy in the dining room of his equally distinguished father. Americans sixty years old or older have lived through a period during which lackadaisical anti-Semitism all but disappeared. It happened almost as suddenly as the anachronization of the word “Negro.” Nobody uses the word Negro anymore, except maybe the United Negro College Fund. Another example of an evolutionized taboo has to do with garbage on coastal waters. It isn’t yet universal, but it has graduated, in my lifetime, from a folkway to a mos. You can take the most disorderly, self-indulgent twenty-one-year-old sailing; he may smoke pot in his cabin while fornicating, but he will not throw the trash overboard. How come?

Something moral in character seems to have been vitalized, or revitalized. Why, and by what? In the matter of anti-Semitism, one can hardly ask for a more melodramatic propulsive agent of racial tolerance than the Holocaust. With the exception of the Arab and the communist worlds, the impact of anti-Semitism, run rampant under the Nazis, has burrowed itself into the sensibilities of the moral style setters in our culture and, through them, pretty much the population at large, always excepting, well, always excepting the exceptions—redneckery never goes away. In the matter of a respect for conservation, the idea of the vulnerable planet worked its way into the agenda of common concerns. It became, to be sure, one part fad, but also one part dogma. And dogmas, strictly defined, tend to reflect attitudes about sin.

The moral theologians of yesteryear used the term ut in pluribus (perceptible by all) to tell us that moral laws, if they hoped to grip the moral imagination, needed to be popularly plausible, and I am here saying that the prospect of racial genocide, as of a ravaged planet, has actually engaged the moral attention even of easily distracted people, forming a habit of mind. And such habits of mind, because they come down to us without mere reference to pain-pleasure criteria, are of a character that qualifies as moral-theological, entitling us to say that we feel it is somehow “sinful” to transgress on what one might call commandments: Thou shalt not discriminate against someone because he is Jewish. Thou shalt not heedlessly exploit nature.

So then, reflection on what it is that “happened” begins, I think, by acknowledging that the capacity to recognize particular habits of conduct as sinful continues to reside in us. Perhaps I say this as an act of faith, speaking as a believing Christian. But non-Christians, and even atheists, are, for the most part, prepared to acknowledge that, whatever the epistemology by which they reach moral decisions, most people are potential clients of argumentation that is extra-instrumentally moral. For instance, thoughtful folk will ponder the moral question whether a fetus is a human being, an intellectual acknowledgment of which would obviously overwhelm utilitarian arguments about the sovereignty of maternal inclinations having to do with life or death questions. What causes us to wonder is the desuetude of the word “sin.” It is as infrequently heard, outside our churches, as the word “God,” and, of course, the terms tend to be associated.

The three generic sanctions that cause societies to cohere are social, legal, and divine. It is hardly difficult to give examples of a deed that offends one of the sanctions but not the other two. One can arrive tieless at a formal party without arousing the police or, one supposes, divine displeasure. One can, illegally, transport bottles of Scotch for sale from Connecticut to New York without affronting one’s neighbors or one’s God. And one can take in vain the name of the Lord without incurring civil or social disapproval.

On the other hand, the three sanctions often make common cause. Murder, rape, theft are only the most obvious examples. The question before the house, however, has to do with that category of offenses against which social, and even legal, sanctions are deliquescent. In most municipalities one can smoke marijuana with de facto legal impunity; and in most middle- and upper-class (“progressive”) households, the weed is smoked with scant social opprobrium. The use of marijuana is not, to my knowledge, specifically proscribed by Judeo-Christianity, but this is so, one supposes, only because no episcopal authority of note has got around to the particularization of the generic law against gluttony: it reasonably follows that to dope the mind is in the same category of excess as to stuff the body, and, therefore, a deadly sin.

But what if religious sanctions against the use of marijuana were to be made explicit? Would we ... well ... notice it? When Dr. Rosenthal talks about vitalizing an ethos against the use of marijuana—made explicit by declining to tolerate young junkies coming to your house to smoke there—he does not mean that our ministers, rabbis, and priests, inveighing against drug-taking, would breathe life into a social sanction, much as the sanction against throwing refuse into the water was vivified by the work of Rachel Carson and those others of the natural ministry who made us conscious of the tenderness of the planet. If the pope, speaking ex cathedra, were to declare sinful the use of marijuana, its use by Catholics would diminish. But in general, an effective ethos needs nowadays to be engineered by extratheological asseverations. Whatever became of sin?

The highly touted Playboy philosophy is ever so much in point here. Some years ago, the chaplain to Yale University, the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, was asked to comment on the rampantly free sex that characterized the Woodstock generation. Mr. Coffin would rather have bombed the dikes in North Vietnam than answer the question by saying that the Judeo-Christian code specifies monogamy as, well, the “code” by which one measures sexual behavior which is “right,” distinguishing it from that which is “wrong.”

What Mr. Coffin said was that anything—anything—can be overdone. For instance, he explained, drinking a beer won’t hurt you, but you have got to guard against becoming an alcoholic. The questioner was supposed to derive from this that a Yale student should not have more than one concubine at a time, because out there in the murky psychological world that is the equivalent of alcoholism of the mind. Take too many lovers or mistresses and you deprive sex of its sublimer meaning, much as if you chug-a-lug a bottle of Mouton-Rothschild 1959 you dilute the pleasure of it. The reverend had, of course, some very good points here—psychological, sociological, and even biological—but they didn’t have very much to do with sin.

In his essay on sin in The Great Ideas, a Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World, Mortimer J. Adler gives us this conspectus: “In the pagan and Judeo-Christian conceptions of sin, the fundamental meaning seems to depend upon the relation of man to the gods or to God, whether that itself be considered in terms of law or love. The vicious act may be conceived as one which is contrary to nature or reason. The criminal act may be conceived as a violation of the law of man, injurious to the welfare of the state or to its members. Both may involve the notions of responsibility and fault. Both may involve evil and wrongdoing. But unless the act transgresses the law of God, it is not sinful. The divine law which is transgressed may be the natural law that God instills in human reason, but the act is sinful if the person who commits the act turns away from God to the worship or love of other things.”

That is pretty straightforward stuff, and would certainly account for the disappearance of “sin” when the word is used other than as a metaphor. It is, however, worth noting as a sign of latent life in the word that, reaching for final gravity with which to denounce or describe a particular situation, one hears such things as, “John’s treatment of Jane was really ... sinful.” We are here suggesting that behavior ultimately offensive is properly described not merely as illegal or antisocial, but, verily, as opposed to the laws of God Himself.

And then, too, the idea of expiation is not entirely foreign to our culture. In formal religious circumstances, Catholics go to confession. There they enumerate their sins, plead contrition, and are given a “penance” and contingent forgiveness. That penance dissipates their sin partially, and in all cases removes from the penitent the mortal burden of a mortal sin that would consign him to eternal damnation. By Catholic arithmetic, there is left owing expiation in another world—the time spent in purgatory—before one is fit to enter into the company of God. Judges in criminal law, under pressure to lighten the prison load and to mete out more imaginative punishments than time in jail, have recently shown signs of inventiveness—a hundred hours of community service, that kind of thing. Perhaps one day not far off a judge will give a young man caught defacing a synagogue, as an alternative to the statutorily permissible one year in jail, an assignment of a half-dozen books of holy Jewish literature to study, from which it would be hoped that the meaning of his desecration would dawn on him. That would be an example of the secular law reaching out to help the divine law.

What has happened to sin is the evanescence of the religious sanction. Irving Kristol has written that the most important political development of the nineteenth century was the wholesale loss of religious faith, the implication of which was that man’s natural idealism turned to utopianism, which always boils down to ideology. Enter the twentieth century. The loss of religious sanctions imposes on the remaining sanctions a heavier weight than they are designed to handle, and when that happens, and society gets serious about something, it has recourse only to force. Nelson A. Rockefeller’s solution to drugs was to take a drug user, put him in jail, and throw away the keys. The great totalitarian triumvirate—Hitler, Stalin, Mao—took the legal sanction further than Cotton Mather took hellfire; or, put another way, in imposing their sanctions they reified hellfire on earth.

And, elsewhere, Kristol touched a grace note of piquancy wonderfully, awesomely grave in its implications. As far as he could figure out, he said, in the United States a man could have sexual intercourse with an eighteen-year-old girl on a public stage just so long as she was being paid the minimum wage. Social sanctions against disgusting behavior—disgusting?—lose vigor if they go uncodified, and even then they lose vigor if the ethos that supports the laws is attenuated. “When one asks how a sense of guilt arises in anyone,” Freud said in Civilization and Its Discontents, “one is told something one cannot dispute: people feel guilty —pious people call it ‘sinful’—when they have done something they know to be ‘bad.’ But then one sees how little this answer tells one.” Legal constraints surrender, up against the force of massive contumacy. As well, at this point, as stopping the spread of pornography in America as during Prohibition one could hope to stop the use of liquor.

Sin sits in the back of the bus. But it is still there, a presence in the conscience, and this is so probably because it was so intended, by the First Mover, that man-in pluribus—should harbor the capacity to distinguish between right and wrong, and that he should feel something between an itch and a compulsion to exercise that capacity:

Because it is wrong, sinful; Res ipsa loquitur! (The matter speaks for itself.) And you shouldn’t need Immanuel Kant to explain it to you. I said over the air not too long ago that I believed in metaphysical equality, that otherwise there was no way I could be made to believe that Mother Teresa and Sister Boom Boom were equal. I have a letter from someone who says he does not understand, and cannot find in any dictionary, the use of the word “metaphysical” to define in any intelligible way the word “equality.” Why, I will write him, it means, here, equal in the eyes of God, and that is all the explanation I need: equal beyond measurement. I’d find it sinful to reason otherwise, even about Sister Boom Boom.

It isn’t only Pope John Paul II who speaks of the necessity of a spiritual revival in order to forward civilized life. Years ago, the late Professor Richard M. Weaver pointed out the obvious, which so often so much needs pointing out: namely, that Marxism and communism are redemptive creeds, while liberalism has no eschatology, no ultimate sense of consummation. Lacking that, it is at a grave disadvantage contending with secular religions which offer absolute achievements to their flock. The rediscovery of sin would cause us to look up and note the infinite horizons that beckon us toward better conduct, better lives, nobler visions.