Bruce Thornton: Frank Rich's Litany of Liberal Myths

[Bruce Thornton is a professor of Classics at Cal State Fresno and author of Bonfire of the Humanities (ISI Books) and Greek Ways (Encounter). ]

If you want a good guide to the pathologies of the liberal mind, look no farther than Frank Rich's weekly column in the Sunday New York Times. In everything he writes, Rich combines an arrogant pretense of enlightened rationalism with a laughable indulgence in modern myths and irrational prejudices, an intellectual incoherence typical of most self-styled "progressives."

Rich's column of December 12 is particularly revealing in this regard, for it touches on what is fast becoming a liberal paranoid obsession: the pernicious power of the Christian "fundamentalists," those unsophisticated, undereducated zealots whom Karl Rove manipulated into reelecting George Bush, thus creating what Rich calls a "cultural twilight zone" as the cowardly media rush to kowtow to this powerful constituency.

What set Rich off was the New York PBS station's short-lived decision not to run an ad for "Kinsey," the just-released movie about sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, whom Rich calls a "pioneer" for his 1948 "Kinsey's Report," which according to Rich taught Americans that adultery was widespread, that "women have orgasms too and that masturbation and homosexuality do not lead to insanity." In other words, in Rich's universe, Kinsey is a hero, a torch of scientific reason dispelling the murky fog of disinformation, shame, guilt, and neuroses brought on by sexual repression.

As such, Rich's take on Kinsey plays into one of the modern world's most powerful myths--the myth of enlightenment. According to this gratifying tale, the neuroses and ignorance fomented by Christianity had kept people enslaved to their fear, shame, and guilt, leading to unhappiness and destructive behavior. Then came the fearless clear-eyed thinkers of the 18th-century Enlightenment and their heirs, who began to shine the light of science and reason on the dark clouds of religious stupidity, so that the knowledge of the true nature of man and the world could liberate us from all the evils that afflict us. Particularly in terms of sex, thinkers like Freud and later Kinsey exploded the old superstitions of religion, which had deformed the natural innocence of human sexuality, thus paving the way for the sexual revolution of the sixties. Today, only the throw-back religious fundamentalists are preventing this liberating knowledge from freeing even more people from the old oppressive intolerant strictures that turn them against their own sexual identities, incite them into repressing the sexuality of the liberated, and prevent people from acquiring the knowledge and contraceptives that could make their natural sexual experiences pain-free and fulfilling. To use the Times headline for Rich's column, these religious nuts are carrying out their "plot against sex in America."

This is the story, one our culture repeats incessantly in television sitcoms, movies, pop songs, popular psychology, and the advice of self-help gurus like Dr. Ruth. And despite all the assertions that this story is simply a rational account of fact, it is instead a self-serving myth full of historical error.

First, Kinsey's significance lies not, as Rich thinks, in revealing new information about sexual behavior to an America mired in Puritan ignorance; Richard Krafft-Ebbing's Psychopathia Sexualis was available in English as early as 1925, and a watered-down Freudianism had for decades been seeping into popular culture and establishing as received wisdom the notion that "sexual repression" was a bad thing and that science was better placed to guide our sexual behavior than were the old-fashioned superstitions and taboos of traditional religion. Kinsey is important because he popularized this movement, and because, unlike Krafft-Ebbing, he didn't designate any of this behavior as "deviant." Also, Kinsey's success at becoming a media sensation occurred because the culture was ready for such a message, particularly in the flush triumphalism of the post-war years, when everybody was in the mood for cutting loose and enjoying the new freedom created by the war. Kinsey simply gave a patina of science to a message many Americans were already primed to hear.

As for Kinsey, what we now know about his personal life seriously compromises the claims that he was some objective, crusading scientist simply recording the truth of human sexual nature. In fact, Kinsey was what used to be called a "pervert," an omnivorous sexual obsessive whose research provided cover for indulging his proclivities. According to James Jones' sympathetic biography, "Within the inner circle of his senior staff members and their spouses, [Kinsey] endeavored to create his own sexual utopia, a scientific subculture whose members would not be bound by arbitrary and antiquated sexual taboos. What he envisioned was in every sense a clandestine scientific experiment, if not a furtive attempt at social engineering: unfettered sex would be the order of the day." With the exception of sex with children (according to Jones), "Kinsey decreed that within the inner circle men could have sex with each other, wives would be swapped freely, and wives, too, would be free to embrace whichever sexual partners they liked."

I may be old-fashioned, but this all has a creepy, Jonestown vibe to it, and at the very least certainly raises serious questions about the value of "research" carried out on a topic in which the researcher has such an intensely vested, not to say neurotic, interest. ...