Thirty years ago first lady Nancy Reagan withstood a torrent of public abuse for her suggestion that schools teach children simply “to say no” to temptations. Mrs. Reagan’s critics did not say what else people are supposed to do to avoid temptation; they were merely certain that the will is powerless and they were outraged at the idea that the possibility of self-control might be entered as an item in the school curriculum. A Lesson for Our Time in Three Late-Antique Narratives: Satyricon,
The Golden Ass, and Confessions
Those who are determined to resist the moral and civic corruption of their age – those who refuse to participate in the flouting of decorum and the degradation of bodies – must also resist the sophistic apology that seeks to excuse the very same moral and civic corruption. This apology typically articulates itself as a form of dogmatic determinism. The apologist denies freedom of will so as to exculpate moral lapses generally, or perhaps those of the enunciator himself specifically; determinism seeks to redefine moral consequences as non-causal outcomes that have somehow happened to people, as it were, at random. We can discern such attempts at spurious exoneration in the oft-heard counseling claim that obnoxious behaviors like dipsomania or drug addiction stem from the dumb proclivity of the organism rather than from witting declensions of a particular character; and in the sociological tenet that crime emerges as a “consequence” of “poverty” or of “oppressive social structures.” Thus a well-known movie actor blames his philandering on his “sex-addiction,” as though his proclivity to fornicate with as many women as possible impinged on him from outside himself so that no personal agency could be discerned in his transgressions. Thus a school board rejects a sex-education curriculum based on the concept of chastity with the argument that abstinence defies nature and is therefore fabulously unrealistic.
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