The Drunkenness of Noah, Giovanni Bellini; 1515

IN THE forthcoming book Our Borders, Our Selves: America in the Age of Multiculturalism, to be published soon by VDare Books, the late Lawrence Auster argues that the cultural revolution of the past 60 years has been, at its roots, a revolt against fatherhood — the fatherhood of human fathers, of all institutions and traditions of authority, and, most importantly, of God Himself.

In this great insight, Auster explains why in our own time, men are infantilized in popular culture, why they are depicted in commercials, TV shows and movies as juvenile and useless. This denigration, and even demonizing, of grown men is a latter day manifestation of the sixties revolt against parents and patriarchy. His observation also explains why many men are immature. For without reverence for fatherhood in all its forms, they simply cannot reach maturity.

Here is the passage:

Symbolically, the father is the structuring source of our existence, whether we are speaking of male authority, of the law, of right and wrong, of our nation, of our heritage, of our civilization, of our biological nature, of our God. All these structuring principles of human life, in their different ways, are symbolically the father. The rebellion we’ve discussed is, in one form or another, a rebellion against the father. The belief that the universe is structured, intelligible, and fundamentally good, and that one can participate in this universe—this is the experience of having a father, which is the opposite of the experience of alienation that drives contemporary culture.

For the revolutionary generation of the 1960s, the psychological source of this rebellion was typically a rejection of their actual parents, because of some perceived inadequacy or betrayal. Letty Cottin Pogrebin, the feminist writer and cofounder of Ms. magazine, writes of a shameful secret her parents had kept from her until she was twelve. Her parents had not been married as long as they claimed. Each been married previously, and the girl who Letty thought was her sister was really her half sister from her mother’s earlier marriage. The discovery of this secret, Pogrebin writes, “destroyed my belief in truth, reality and all adults. . . . The discovery of my parents’ charade left its mark. I became an inveterate doubter, always peeling the onion trying to get at the truth beneath the “facts.” … I will never know how much [this decoding instinct] has damaged my capacity to trust.” Apparently it’s damaged it a great deal, since she goes on to say that her family’s secrets “set the stage for my later involvement in the women’s movement. Feminism’s challenge to sexual hypocrisy and sex-role coercion seemed to directly address my experience growing up with a mother, grandmother and aunts who had to cloak themselves in deception before they could face the world.”

While I do not deny the shock and trauma that Pogrebin’s childhood experience must have caused her, what is remarkable is the way she lets that event color her approach to all of reality. She makes no effort to step outside her own situation or to see that her parents’ lie may not be typical of life in general. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that it is not fair to cast the stigma of her parents’ deception on other people. Nor does she try to forgive her parents and heal the wound. Instead, she rejoices in the way that she has adopted that wound as her defining characteristic, and as the basis of her lifelong suspicion of society, and even, she says, of reality itself. She is proud of her alienation, of her belief in a universal hypocrisy.

For many 1960s radicals, hatred of their parents, mainly their fathers, shaped a general hostility toward the larger society. This destructive generation is guilty of the sin of Ham, the son of Noah, who saw the nakedness of his father when Noah had fallen asleep drunk. Instead of covering him, Ham offered him up to further humiliation (see Gen. 9:22). When Noah awakes and finds out what his son Ham has done, he casts a curse on him. The meaning of the story is that Ham, by not covering up—not forgiving—his father’s weakness but trying to display it to the world has destroyed his own soul. To look too closely at one’s father’s inevitable defects implies a disastrous loss of perspective, a denial of the father’s human worth, and the respect one owes him. To peer mercilessly at the flaws of our civilization, as the adversary culture has done, implies a similar loss of balance. A primal sin is at the root of it. There are feelings of veneration, awe, love, respect, gratitude, affection that are natural and proper to feel for the author of one’s being—whether it be one’s own parents or one’s country. The fountainhead of these natural affections has been poisoned by today’s anti-culture, led by the feminist attack on male authority and by the multiculturalist trashing of white America.

[…]

The above discussion suggests the source of the infamous liberal guilt complex, which has so damaged our institutions.

Why do liberals feel guilty? They feel guilty because they are guilty. They feel guilty because, in their self-absorption and self-worship, they are alienated from objective moral values, from their own civilization, and from God. Alienated, they feel a restless unease within themselves. But instead of recognizing the source of the unease, which is their self-worship, they project their selfishness onto external reality, onto “society.” Thus, when Mrs. Clinton self-righteously told an interviewer that “we should try to treat our cleaning women like human beings,” her comment naturally led people to suspect that it was Mrs. Clinton herself who did not see cleaning women as human beings, and that, instead of recognizing the source of estrangement within herself, she projected it onto others, imagining that they needed instruction from her.

For the alienated radical, natural human relationships, traditional religion, morality, and normal patriotism are the sources of all the ills and oppressions in the world, and of their own roiling discontent. But because they have cut themselves off from the sources of order, their concern for the oppressed is really a neurotic attempt to assuage an inward disorder in themselves, which they cannot do as long as they remain alienated. As a result, in their solicitude for the oppressed, and in their rage at “society,” at “white racism,” and at “patriarchy,” they always try to do too much. Nothing is ever enough, only the announced intention to heal all the inequality and injustice in the world will suffice, even as they show a lack of concern for anyone who is not a designated victim according to the leftist scheme of things. Their pursuit of justice is not an ethically ordered activity toward the good, but the expression of an unassuageable appetite.

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