An essay in universal history

18. THE SEXUAL AND THERAPEUTIC REVOLUTIONS

Important changes in faith and morality in America took place after the war. Apart from increased prosperity, perhaps the most important impetus to this was the “scientific” research of Alfred Kinsey on sexual behavior. Jonathan von Maren writes: “He is known as ‘The Father of the Sexual Revolution,’ and if you’ve ever taken a university course on 20^th century history, you’ll have heard his name: Alfred Kinsey.
“Kinsey was not only the ‘father’ of the Sexual Revolution, he set the stage for the massive social and cultural upheaval of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s with his 1948 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and his 1953 Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.
“These books revealed to a shocked and somewhat titillated population things they had never known about themselves: That between 30-45% of men had affairs, 85% of men had had sex prior to marriage, that a staggering 70% of men had slept with prostitutes, and that between 10 and 37% of men had engaged in homosexual behavior.
“Much less talked about were his other disturbing ‘findings’ - an in-depth study on the ‘sexual behavior’ of children, as well as claims that nearly 10% of men had performed sex acts with animals (as well as 3.6% of women), and that this number rose to between 40-50% based on proximity to farms.

Got that?

“Kinsey’s research portrayed people as amoral and sex-driven, and is credited as fundamentally changing the way our culture views sex.

“But was he right?
“To begin with, the integrity of much of his work has long since been called into question: among his questionable practices, Kinsey encouraged those he was working with to engage in all types of sexual activity as a form of research, misrepresented single people as married, and hugely over represented incarcerated sex criminals and prostitutes in his data.
“But beyond this is the simple fact that Kinsey himself was a pervert and a sex criminal.
“For example, where did he get all of his data on the “sexual behavior of children”? The answer is nothing short of chilling. Dr. Judith Reisman (whose research has since been confirmed time and time again) explained in her ground-breaking work Sex, Lies and Kinsey that Kinsey facilitated brutal sexual abuse to get his so-called research:
“Kinsey solicited and encouraged pedophiles, at home and abroad, to sexually violate from 317 to 2,035 infants and children for his alleged data on normal ‘child sexuality.’ Many of the crimes against children (oral and anal sodomy, genital intercourse and manual abuse) committed for Kinsey’s research are quantified in his own graphs and charts…
“Kinsey’s so-called research was simply a quest to justify the fact that he himself was a deeply disturbed man. Dr. Reisman writes, ‘Both of Kinsey’s most recent admiring biographers confessed he was a sadistic bi/homosexual, who seduced his male students and coerced his wife, his staff and the staff’s wives to perform for and with him in illegal pornographic films made in the family attic. Kinsey and his mates, Wardell Pomeroy, Clyde Martin and Paul Gebhard, had ‘front’ marriages that concealed their strategies to supplant what they say as a narrow pro-creational Judeo-Christian era with a promiscuous ‘anything goes’ bi/gay pedophile paradise.’
“Got that? The Father of the Sexual Revolution was a sado-masochistic bi-sexual sex criminal who facilitated the sexual torture of infants and children. His goal was not just to engage in scientific research in order to see where the data took him, but rather, as one of his prominent biographers Michael Jones notes, to launch a crusade to undermine traditional sexual morality. He did so to wild success—Kinsey’s influence on sex education and law in the Western world is absolutely staggering…”²²⁵
Another important feature of the post-war world was the increasing popularity of psychotherapy as a substitute for faith. Thus the Jewish rabbi Joshua Liebman, whose book Peace of Mind, published in 1946, topped the New York Times bestseller list for 58 weeks, a record, compared analysis and the confessional, and came to the conclusion that analysis was superior in producing peace of mind. “’The confessional only touches the surface of a man’s life,’ he said, while the spiritual advice of the church throws no light on the causes that lead someone to confession in the first place. Moreover, priestly strictures about confessants showing more ‘willpower’ were ‘ineffective counsels’.
“On the other hand, psychotherapy was, Liebman said, designed to help someone work on his (or her) own problems without ‘borrowing’ the conscience of a priest, and ‘offers change through self-understanding, not self-condemnation’. And this was the unique way to inner peace. The human self, Liebman insisted, was not a gift from God, as traditionally taught, but an achievement.
“The religion of the future, he declared, must poach from the psychotherapist’s armoury. He told his readers that henceforth it should not be ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’ but ‘Thou shalt love thyself properly and then thou wilt be able to love thy neighbour’.”
We see here the beginning of that “psychology of self-worship” and self-obsession that became so dominant in the therapeutic culture of the 1960s and 70s. Liebman is as wrong as it is possible to be. First of all, it is the therapist, not the priest, who only touches the surface of a man’s life. Deep in man, deeper even than his passions, is his God-given conscience, which, as we have seen, is not a socially indoctrinated construct, but the eye of God in the soul of man. When a man transgresses his conscience he feels guilt, and no amount of psychotherapy can relieve him of that guilt but only the confession of his sins before God and a priest (whose conscience he does not “borrow”, although he may occasionally check his conscience against the preist’s).
Secondly, it is precisely self-condemnation, and not simply “self-understanding” that alone can relieve the penitent of his guilt, for “he who condemns himself will not be judged” – neither by his own conscience, not by God. Liebman regards the light of consciousness and rational discussion as the means of destroying the darkness of neurotic suffering. But the Christian regards the healing power to be the light of God Who alone forgives men their sins and grants them healing. The analyst does not heal so much as help the patient to heal himself by becoming conscious of his inner state. But for the Christian, consciousness of his inner state is not enough: he must also condemn that which is sinful in that state, repent of it, and ask God to destroy it.
By 1950, as Peter Watson writes, “thanks to Liebman’s lead, four out of five theological schools had psychologists on their staff. 117 centres for clinical pastoral psychology had been established.
“At first the church showed resistance to, in particular, psychoanalysis. Ministers condemned it as an ‘unsatisfactory mix of materialism, hedonism, infantilism and eroticism’ and, in contrast to the confessional, therapy gave no norms or standards. This intransigence didn’t last, however, because in February 1954 Pope Pius XII gave pastoral psychology a tentative go-ahead.
“Other churches followed, and so one can say that the mid-1950s really marks the point at which a secular psychological model of ‘fulfillment’, ‘wholeness’ and ‘self-realisation’ in this life, began to outweigh a religious concept of ‘salvation’ in an afterlife. And it was this sanctioning of psychology by religious institutions that, as much as anything, encouraged the ‘therapy boom’ that blossomed in the 1960s. Psychotherapy was now proliferating internationally. It epitomized new ways of living and, for many, it replace religion.
“As the number of clergy plummeted – so much so that some people were predicting the extinction of the Anglican church within a generation – the ranks of counselors snowballed. In fact, by the end of the 20^th century, the profusion of therapies constituted what the sociologist Frank Furedi identified as ‘therapy culture’.
“But therapy was only one of there developments that, for many people, replaced the role of religion following the Second World War. The other two were drugs and music – in particular, rock and roll. These together comprised what was called the counter-culture.
“It is worth pointing out that roughly one in fourpeople born in the west after the Second World War has used illegal drugs – it is not a fringe activity. And it was against this background that, in 1960, Timothy Leary first ingested Psilocybe Mexicana, the mysterious magical mushroom of Mexico. As a result, Leary, a psychology lecturer at Harvard University, came to the view that these mushrooms – whose active ingredient was from the same family as LSD – could ‘revolutionise’ psychotherapy, bringing with it the ‘possibility of instantaneous self-insight’.”²²⁶
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“In his 2009 book The Permissive Society,” writes Joel J. Miller, “historian Alan Petigny makes the case that the upheavals of the sixties were just manifestations of religious changes from the forties and fifties…
“Petigny describes what he calls the Permissive Turn, a liberalization of values that happened following World War II. Some of it came down to a ‘renunciation of renunciation.’ The war had demanded a great deal of austerity and self-sacrifice. But with Germany and Japan subdued, it was time to live it up. Americans plowed their prosperity into material self-gratification. But there was more.
“At the same time, the culture witnessed a shift in the way we viewed human nature. We swapped the traditional American view, grounded in a certain pessimism inherited from the Protestant understanding of original sin, for the newly refurbished and Americanized psychotherapy.
“Freud was no fan of faith, and the rivalry was both hot and clear in Europe. Not so in America, where advocates such as Joshua Liebman, Carl Rogers, Benjamin Spock, and others presented the benefits of psychotherapy without the thorny, antireligious aspects inherent to Freud’s vision. The effect was pronounced. Just two decades after WWII, sociology professor Philip Rieff could look back and talk about the ‘triumph of the therapeutic’ (emphasis added).
“No such triumph was obvious at the outset. In November 1949, Irving Kristol pointed to the incompatibility of psychotherapy and religion in an article for Commentary. The controversy was topical enough—and Kristol’s opinion notable enough—that Time magazine actually covered his article.
“How could Americans, particularly religious Americans, take psychotherapy’s rose and avoid the thorn? The answer, said Kristol, was to shift the conversation away from ultimate questions of truth and toward temporal questions of health and happiness:
“Most clerics and analysts blithely agree that religion and psychoanalysis have at heart the same intention: to help men “adjust,” to cure them of their vexatious and wasteful psychic habits (lasting despair and anxiety), to make them happy or virtuous or productive. In so far as religion and psychoanalysis succeed in this aim, they are ‘true.’
“What’s the problem with that? We made truth a question of outcomes. Does x make you happy? Then it’s probably good. Does y make you anxious? Then it’s probably bad.
“John Crowe Ransom argued in God Without Thunder (1930) that most Americans had already traded away the traditional view of God and replaced it with varying degrees of enthusiasm about science, progress, and the like. Here was the most definitive proof of his thesis. Religion, morality, even reality were now questions of self-fulfillment—making truth subjective and traditional truth claims irrelevant and meaningless.
“Over the course of his book, Petigny shows how this mindset swept the country, the culture, and the churches through the 1950s. ‘Americans,’ he says, ‘were coming to view the self as a boundless reservoir of inherent goodness and potentiality. . . .’ According to the new and prevailing view, ‘[T]he perspective of people who look inward to their hearts for moral guidance provides us with the best hope for the future of mankind.’
“Once self-fulfillment becomes the end towards which individuals are moving, then there is no longer any fixed council or direction to govern any particular individual’s choice—only what a person claims will lead to his personal betterment, as only he is entitled to determine. Individual autonomy and self-indulgence trump all else…
By 1966, Rieff could speak about our cultural commitment to ‘the gospel of self-fulfilment.’
“Having enshrined individual autonomy as authoritative, it’s just a question of time and the tide of personal inclination [before everything is permitted]…”²²⁷ 
Not all American psychotherapy was secular. For example, Ron Hubbard’s “Church of Scientology” began as a form of psychotherapy, dianetics, but then evolved (perhaps for financial reasons) into a religion.²²⁸ But self-fulfilment, rather than God, remained the centre of all such “therapeutic religions”.
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Religion and morals were declining no less fast in Europe than in America. European social democracy assumed that society could be good without God, and that the only ultimately important thing was Mammon – provided it was distributed relatively equitably and there was a safety net for the poor. Not that religion was persecuted – outwardly, at any rate. But it was treated with condescension, as a relic of outdated modes of thought that would inevitably wither away in time. Even Christian parties such as the Christian Democrats of Germany and Italy put much more emphasis on the “Democrat” than the “Christian” part of their name. And if the Anglicans had once been “the Tory Party at prayer”, they were becoming less and less conservative (with a small ‘c’) as they rapidly lost their faith and abandoned their churches.
Catholicism was a harder nut for the secularist Weltanschauung to crack. And in Southern Europe, especially the Latin countries of Italy, Spain and Portugal, the Roman Catholic Church maintained its grip on the hearts and minds – and voting patterns - of their flock throughout the pontificate of Pope Pius XII (1939-58). But Pius was the last of the really papist popes. His successor, John XXIII, declared his desire “to throw open the windows of the Church so that we can see out and the people can see in”. Both directions of openness proved unsettling and undermining of the Church’s reputation well into the twenty-first century. On the one hand, the world has seen into the darker crannies of the Roman Church, especially the abuse of children by priests. And on the other hand, the Catholics have seen out into the Protestant and non-Christian worlds and have been deeply influenced by them.
The Protestant countries of Northern Europe were undergoing a rapid transformation of morals that revealed a darker side of the all-embracing state. This was particularly true of that paragon of Social Democracy, Scandinavia. “Early twentieth-century confidence in the capacity of the state to make a better society had taken many forms: Scandinavian Social Democracy – like the Fabian reformism of Britain’s welfare state – was born of a widespread fascination with social engineering of all kinds. And just a little beyond the use of the state to adjust incomes, expenditures, employment and information there lurked the temptation to tinker with individuals themselves.
“Eugenics – the ‘science’ of racial improvement – was more than an Edwardian-era fad, like vegetarianism or rambling (though it often appealed to the same constituencies). Taken by thinkers of all political shades, it dovetailed especially well with the ambitions of well-meaning social reformers. If one’s social goal was to improve the human condition wholesale, why pass up the opportunities afforded by modern science to add retail amelioration along the way? Why should the prevention or abolition of imperfections in the human condition not extend to the prevention (or abolition) of imperfect human beings? In the early decades of the twentieth century the appeal of scientifically manipulated social or genetic planning was widespread and thoroughly respectable; it was only thanks to the Nazis, whose ‘hygienic’ ambitions began with ersatz anthropometrics and ended in the gas chamber, that it was comprehensively discredited in post-war Europe. Or so it was widely supposed.
“But, as it emerged many years later, Scandinavian authorities at least had not abandoned an interest in the theory – and practice – of ‘racial hygiene’. Between 1934 and 1976 sterilization programmes were pursued in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, in each case under the auspices and with the knowledge of Social Democratic governments. In these years some 6,000 Danes, 40,000 Norwegians and 60,000 Swedes (90 percent of them women) were sterilized for ‘hygienic’ purposes ‘to improve the population’. The intellectual driving force behind these programmes – the Institute of Racial Biology at the University of Uppsala in Sweden – had been set up in 1921, at the peak of the fashion for the subject. It was not dismantled until fifty-five years later…”²²⁹
It was in Europe that the contraceptive pill was discovered. Norman Stone writes: ”The fifties ended with optimism and in retrospect seem to have been the last gasp of the old world. Families stayed together, women in the home or aiming to be, and the laws governing divorce or contraception were sometimes ridiculously difficult. A Catholic hierarch in Paris remarked that it was all very well to say that an extra child might break the family’s budget and starve; it would die surrounded by love.”²³⁰
But at the beginning of the sixties came the contraceptive pill, and then everything changed… “The Pill’s effect on the relations of the sexes was, said Conrad Russell, like that of the nuclear bomb on international relations. On 1 June 1961 it came on the market in Germany (through Schering AG). It had origins going back to the early twenties, a time when ‘race improvement’ (eugenics) was fashionable, and the poor or stupid were supposed to be discouraged from procreating (in Sweden, up to the 1970s, Lapps were being sterilized on the grounds that they drank too much and were not very bright). German scientists received grants from American foundations for such research (the money was frozen in Germany under Hitler, and was used to pay for the experiments of Josef Mengele, at Auschwitz). Preventing ovulation has been done by natural methods in the past… In 1951 Carl Djerassi, of Bulgarian-Jewish and Viennese origins, working in Mexico and connected with the Swiss chemical firm Ciba, took out a patent, and experimented with the first synthetic compound in 1956 in Haiti. Germans marketed the Pill first, but it spread very rapidly. Freeing women from unwanted childbirth was equivalent to a new dimension in world history. Before 1914, in England, women doctors had not been allowed to contribute to medical journals because this was thought to be immodest, indicating an interest in the body that was improper. Fifty years later, women were establishing themselves in a man’s world – probably the single greatest change, among the very many that set in after the Second World War. In the next generation, even mothers of small children were going out to work, some of them very successful, and many others left with no choice but drudgery. Feminism became a fashionable cause…”²³¹
David F. Prentis writes: “Although there has always been contraception, its acceptance and practice by society as a whole is a relatively new phenomenon. In the first part of the 20^th century barrier methods became through mass production increasingly used. However, with the advent of the hormonal contraceptive pill in the 1960s the contraceptive era, ushering in the sexual revolution, really took off.
“The term ‘revolution’ is by no means exaggerated, for the result was a fundamental change in the understanding of human sexuality in society. With the pill, people thought, nothing can happen, i.e. no child could be conceived. Inhibitions broke down, so that there was an increase in adultery, living together before marriage and living together with no thought of marriage. Amoral sex education with the message, ‘You can do anything you like so long as your partner agrees and you use contraception. If there is an accident, have an abortion,’ promoted sexual promiscuity from puberty onwards. Sexual activity has been degraded into a form of entertainment.
“The immediate consequences of promiscuity starting in adolescence are obvious: the rampant increase of sexually transmitted diseases, infertility and the incapability of forming long-term relationships through frequent changes of partners and repeated disappointments.
“The assumption that ‘nothing can happen’ is erroneous, because contraceptives are by no means 100% effective. Children are conceived, and such ‘errors’ must be corrected – the child is aborted. The result has been devastating: the number of babies killed by abortion every year is about the same as the total number of deaths in the whole of World War II.
“Apart from the carnage, enormous havoc is created in the relationship of the parents, whether married or not, very often leading to its breakdown…
“The widespread practice of abortion leads to euthanasia. If it is acceptable to kill one category of people, then it is logically acceptable to kill others, specifically the ill, the handicapped and the old, for human life is no longer sacred. A chilling example of this kind of development can be seen in the National Socialist regime in Germany.
“The pill ‘culture’ leads to the rejection of children, small families, and a demographic winter. In the long-term it will be impossible to pay pensions…
“The separation of sexual activity from child-bearing leads to the acceptance of the production of children through assisted reproduction without recourse to the marital act in the case of infertility. Through IVF society is being led, inspired by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, to the acceptance of controlled reproduction. Human beings are reduced to products. They are mass produced, selected, rejected, frozen or used in experiments. They are treated as material goods, in short, as slaves.
“Slavery has been formally reintroduced into society. A doctor, whether mixing sperm and eggs in a Petri dish or injecting a sperm into an egg, is playing God…
“When the practice of sterilised sexual intercourse is accepted, it leads logically to the acceptance of all practices leading to orgasm: oral, anal, homosexual acts, etc. The whole homosexual movement has become possible only through the general acceptance of contraceptive practice and the reduction of sexuality to a source of entertainment…
“Contraception, which leads logically to other evils as described above, is destroying society. There are too few children and nations are dying out. It leads to abortion, as those who promote it concede. The combination of promoting promiscuity through Godless sex education, the long-term use of hormonal contraception with back-up abortions and the postponement of child-bearing leads to increased infertility…
“The long-term purpose of this policy could well be the desire to subject reproduction to state control, which would allow only those children to be born who pass quality control. At present this is illusory, but the tendency can be seen. It would appear that an elite group wishes to create a society of virtual slaves obedient to their desires. A new totalitarianism is being formed.
“To this end it is necessary to destroy or at least weaken marriage and the family. For this purpose contraception, especially the convenient hormonal forms, is eminently suitable. And those who pour their millions into the homosexual movement and the gender ideology are not concerned with helping homosexuals and those with problems of sexual identity. Rather they are using these people to extend the concept of marriage and ultimately to widen its meaning so much as to make it meaningless.”²³²
The sexual revolution was linked to other revolutionary changes in the West in this period.
“Starting in the Sixties,” writes Peter Osborne, the liberal elite “captured first the universities, then the schools and then much of the mainstream media. It finally grabbed control of political parties and then the instruments of government (in the case of Britain, the Civil Service) and other key national institutions.
“Clever, chippy and articulate, this new ruling class mocked traditional notions of honour, duty and public service. It considered the nation state as an artificial construction — and continues to do so.
“Most crucially of all, the ruling elite has set out to destroy the two-parent family, a framework which for millennia has done more than any other to shape human society.
“It is important to point out that since the Sixties, laws have been passed that have made divorce much easier and there have been changes to the tax system which have encouraged single-parent families and marginalised fatherhood.
“As academic studies have shown, the human cost of this giant social experiment is beyond computation in terms of broken lives. With its insidious attacks on institutions such as the family and the Church, and by destroying people’s sense of community, the liberal elite has removed those traditional bulwarks against exploitation of the vulnerable.
“For it was families, community networks and church groups that came together to enforce standards of decency and morality. These also helped those who fell on hard times.
“Meanwhile, this state-driven attack on these institutions has coincided with a period when differences in the wealth of the rich and the poor are at levels not seen since the Victorian era. A new class of super-rich has taken advantage of cheap labour offered by mass immigration. This international elite has also shamelessly exploited the increasing sense that national boundaries don’t matter and have spirited their money away to places which impose less in taxes.”²³³