Frog in Water, Part Two: Morality as a new brand of `transgression`

In last week’s column, I wrote that what is needed today is a deeper insight into the processes that have created the mentality that acts of pedophilia are somehow “acceptable”, or even “progressive”, whether committed by those in positions of power or the ordinary citizen, and that these processes, clearly, are neither accidental or sudden.  A recent article in “Der Spiegel”(“How the left took things too far”, by Jan Fleischhauer and Weibke Hollersen) might provide part of that insight .  

As they point out in the article, the left has had its own tales of child abuse.  The mentality that came out of the 1968 German movement, one of whose goals was the sexual “liberation” of children and the overcoming of all sexual inhibition, created a perfect climate for legitimizing pedophilia today as “progressive.”  In the various schools and centers established by the “Rote Freiheit” (Red Freedom), which had as its goal the shaping of “socialist personalities”, there was, according to former participants, a “strong emphasis on sex education…almost every day, the students played games that involved taking off their clothes, reading porno magazines together and pantomiming intercourse.”  A basement space was used as well to as an "observation station" to study sexual behavior in children, and mattresses were placed throughout to encourage sex play.  After extensive material about its activities was leaked to the media, the Berlin state parliament placed the Rote Freiheit after-school center on its agenda.  It was shocked to discover that the Psychology Institute at the Free University of Berlin had itself “established the facility and provided the educators who worked there.”

The publishing world participated as well in the “creation of socialist personalities” by “overcoming all sexual inhibitions.”  The leftist magazine “Konkret” openly advocated sex with minors.  (Its editor, Klaus Rainer Rohl, was later accused by his own daughters of enthusiastically practicing what he preached with them in his own home.)  A bestseller back then by Rowohlt, the German publishing giant ("Revolution der Erziehung", or "The Revolution in Education"), had this to say about child sexuality:  "The de-eroticization of family life, from the prohibition of sexual activity among children to the taboo of incest, serves as preparation for total assimilation -- as preparation for the hostile treatment of sexual pleasure in school and voluntary subjugation to a dehumanizing labor system."  In other words, depriving children of sex, even with other family members, leads to subjugation, repression, and robotization. 

And although nowadays, the stimulation of a child's sex organs by an adult is punished by law as criminal sexual assault, for the revolutionaries of 1968, it was an “educational tool that helped create a new person,” according to the "Handbook of Positive Child Indoctrination," published in 1971:  "children can learn to appreciate eroticism and sexual intercourse long before they are capable of understanding how a child is conceived. It is valuable for children to cuddle with adults. It is no less valuable for sexual intercourse to occur during cuddling." Green Party politician and current member of the French Parliament, Daniel Cohn Bendit, describes in his 1975 biography the “cuddling” that took place while he worked as a teacher in one of these children’s schools.  When one of the children entrusted to his care opened his fly and began stroking his sexual organ, he writes that he was “usually quite taken aback.  My reactions varied, depending on the circumstances."

Some, however, felt shame at having participated in these experiments, at least in retrospect, and felt compelled to critically examine their experiences. Sophie Dannerberg was one, and in her intimate memoir, “Das bleiche Herz der Revolution” (Pale Heart of the Revolution) reveals, for example, that one of the main topics of parent debate in her school was whether it was a good idea to have sex with their own children, so as to demonstrate the "naturalness" of sexual intercourse.

Is it so surprising then that, today, there is such confusion (and not just in the church) over what constitutes sexual abuse, and where the line should be drawn in interactions with children?  Is it so surprising that even priests, who are after all only human, with all the human frailties and doubts, should surrender to the “progressive”, “modern” trends that began in the revolutionary sixties and  continue to be extolled today in most of Western society? 

After all, when a society becomes too permissive, when there is too much of everything, a gradual lowering of taboos occurs, a loss of desire.  This results in an ever increasing stimuli in the form of new vices and transgressions, simply to provoke a reaction, any reaction, to rouse the stupefied body, titillate the glands, and speed up the nervous system. As the philosopher John Gray writes in “Straw Dogs”:

“What happens when we run out of new vices?  ….At that point, we may be sure, morality will come back into fashion.  We may not be far from a time when “morality” is marketed as a new brand of transgression.”

It gives us something to hope for, doesn’t it? Morality as a new brand of “transgression.”