On the Idea of National Decline

“It is, I believe, more than anything else, the undeniable reality of technological progress that lulls us into accepting the more general—and plainly false—proposition that things will just keep on improving in every respect.”

There is no surer way to feel on the most visceral level that we are entering a new Dark Age than to watch an LGBTQIA+ pride parade in action. I was on my way to the Home Depot on 23rd Street in Manhattan on Sunday, June 30th, having forgotten that the pride parade was on the agenda for that afternoon. When I got out of the subway at 23rd and Broadway, I found myself in the thick of it, with no obvious way out. Nearly every escape route was cordoned off, and the crowds of onlookers and participants, there being no obvious distinction between those two categories, were obstructing every path forward. I was not in a hurry, but I also was not especially keen on spending precious free time crowded in among people who had actually made a deliberate choice to attend this sorry spectacle. I put on a podcast and did my best to tune out my surroundings, as I edged inch by inch through the throng toward my destination.

What I saw, despite myself—and what I unfortunately cannot unsee—was a depressing display of total and utter vulgarity and superficiality. As long as no one gets hurt in the process, I have nothing against consenting adults who have sexual preferences that differ from my own. Yet I would scoff at anyone—heterosexuals, homosexuals, transsexuals, asexuals…anyone—who decides to define himself or herself by a sexual identity and turn it, literally or figuratively, into a parade float. Many who fall into the LGBTQIA+ basket seem to believe, in my experience, that simply by expressing their sexual preferences and/or conforming their identities to the familiar grid lines sketched out by their somewhat more original predecessors in the gay rights movement, they are accomplishing something important, pathbreaking, and transgressive, even as they embody living, breathing stereotypes just as clownish and ludicrous in their own way as preening, beer-swilling, high-fiving heterosexual frat boys, with their crude sexual innuendos and bathroom humor. I am sure, of course, that there remain many, but increasingly not that many, sheltered “normals” out in the demonized American backwoods who genuinely find some LGBTQIA+ people and behaviors disturbing—though I should pause to remark here that the feeling is probably mutual. And, yes, forced to stand and gawk at how these oft-unaesthetic people (un)dress and generally present themselves, one is hard-pressed to avoid acknowledging the effortfully cultivated ugliness on display. But the problem runs far deeper than that.

The problem is that our society has seen fit to devote an entire month to celebrating particular forms of sexuality and identity and that so many lost souls would come out to partake in the debauchery. Our obsession with sexuality has been noted by many commentators. The late left populist historian Christopher Lasch ascribed the preoccupation to the collapse of organic communal bonds and the elimination of the element of play from our working lives, while the integral theorist Ken Wilber has argued that because our secular, materialistic society increasingly gives us no other viable outlets for our spirituality, we land on sexuality as one of the few remaining options that appears to take us beyond the confines of the everyday self. Authors such as D. H. Lawrence exemplified that view of sex as a gateway to higher states. Freud, himself notoriously fixated on the sexual dimension of human experience (and condemned by Lawrence as a rationalizer of our sacred, irrational passions), noted that we gravitate toward perverse sexuality in particular because it seems to offer us a higher species of satisfaction completely divorced from the procreative, i.e., productive, sex act. In the words of the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization, “Against a society which employs sexuality as means for a useful end, the perversions uphold sexuality as an end in itself,” thereby seeming to defy the strictures of the capitalist order.