Breathing Toxic, Foetid Air

The Nauseating Stench of Vapid Idealism

It seems that idealism has inundated the Commentariat, at least in New Zealand.  It's not just the government and its agencies.  A form of insipid idealism also appears to pervade the atmosphere of the once smoke-filled editorial rooms of our daily newspapers.  How bizarre.  Cynicism was once not only a trade-mark of the media, it was a requirement to get a union card.  Now we are all being asked to breathe the free air of an imaginary, ideal world.

Consider the following editorial discussing government sex education which appeared in the NZ Herald:

In an ideal world, parents would teach their children respectful attitudes to sex. In reality, that is not always happening. . . .

Arguments about individual morality and cultural sensitivity have made this an area in which governments have hesitated to intrude. They know also that there will be a backlash from a minority who believe sex education has no place in schools and is the plaything of dissolute liberals.  But what the select committee has suggested is far removed from that.

Ideally, boys would have improved attitudes and girls would be safer and better understand their rights. At present ... the balance may be tilted against this outcome.

(The parliamentary committee evaluating government sex education in schools has clearly also be caught up in this miasma.  It too is asking us to dream up an ideal world--of improved attitudes and better understanding of rights.  Apparently the Herald has gone to a revival meeting and got religion; it has bought into this aura of hope and change. )

The yellow brick road to sexual utopia is going to be paved with students in schools making "respectful and informed choices".  Ideally.
  Sex education in government schools is going to achieve that outcome.  Ideally.  Count on it.  It never has in the past--but this time it will be different.  Ideally.  (Cue that hoary definition of insanity to do with repeating the same mistake and expecting a different outcome.)  Then comes another use of the "i" word:

Ideally, boys would have improved attitudes and girls would be safer and better understand their rights. At present, especially when parents do not involve themselves, the balance may be tilted against this outcome.

One of the dysfunctional aspects of Unbelief which never seems to go away is that, as Chesterton observed, when people stop believing in God, they will believe in anything.  They become wistfully credulous.  They are unable, for whatever reason, of following the not ignoble example of Friedrich Nietzsche who strove to face the implications--horrible though they be--of a world where God was dead, and who sought to glory in them, to the point of becoming insane. Instead, most people--certainly the New Zealand Commentariat--have retreated to a wistful soporific hope of an "ideal world", characterised by respect and self-awareness of rights. 

But, at the same time, and out of the other side of the mouth, comes the deeply religious assertion that the individual soul, the self, is the only effective, actual ultimate reality.  We can be anything we want to be.  The only restrictions are those we place upon ourselves.  The role of society and the community is to cheerlead everyone along the  road to self-actualisation and self-respect.  As psychologist Paul E. Vitz declared back in the late seventies:

Selfish psychology emphasizes the human capacity for change to the point of almost totally ignoring the idea that life has limits and that knowledge of them is the basis of wisdom.  For selfists there seem to be no acceptable duties, denials, inhibitions, or restraints.  Instead there are only rights and the opportunities for change. [Paul E. Vitz, Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship (Grand Rapids: William B Eerdmans, 1977), p.38.]

Now, thirty years on, the diseased fruit of this selfist rebellion against God is ripening.  Let's reflect on how this call for respectful attitudes and acknowledgement of rights has played out, and will play out, in sex education in our government schools.  Respect must apply not just to attitudes and actions towards members of the opposite sex.  It must also be applied to all human sexualities--to the sexuality of the homosexual, the trans-sexual, the bi-sexual, the multi-sexual, and the serially promiscuous.  Respect will include acknowledging the rights of people to be as they choose, without denials, inhibitions, or restraints.  

Government sex education will start from these foundations and move outwards.  Therefore, it will ultimately promote libertine sexual behaviour.  It is inevitable:  "Man is the master of his fate (that is, God is dead) and nothing human is foreign to me."  Unbelieving, atheistic sex education cannot "ideally" be anything else.  It has no foundation, no framework, no moral grounding to be anything else. 

The bottom line is that when a kid declares in class, "I am trans-gender" the only response permissible by agents of the state is to say, "Right on.  Let's all respect that."  We challenge any government school educator, any sex teacher in government schools, any official in the Ministry of Education, or any politician, or anyone in the Herald editorial conference room, for that matter, to say otherwise.  And that, mums and dads, makes a complete mockery of all this pious talk about "ideally respectful attitudes".  Respect is only going to go one way.

The government sex curriculum will not only teach implicit sexual promiscuity--since it must respect the choices of all, including the rampantly promiscuous--it also has to accede to the demands by homosexual, trans-sexual, bi-sexual and omni-sexual provocateurs that their respective sexualities must be part of the sex-ed curriculum and be presented in a "respectful" way--that is, promoted as normal, legitimate, holy, just, and good sexual behaviour.

This is the real world of government sex education.  And all the kings horses and all the kings men, sitting in their little committees in the Ministry of Education, or in parliament, or in the education unions, know this to be true.  But ideally, by their lights, they want to keep that particular dirty secret locked away.  And they do a pretty good job--so much so that the Herald and other media outlets whimsically suspend their critical unbelief and go along, to get along.  Rather they all talk wistfully about "an ideal world" where things will be different from the reality they know exists, but refuse to face up to, preferring to keep it as a dirty little secret between those in the know. 

They cannot bring themselves to do anything to criticise or blaspheme the religion of Self.  Why, such a thing would be disrespectful.