Id control: as quickly as social restraints are toppled, governments erect new ones in the form of regulations

National Review, Nov 10, 1997 by Kenneth Minogue

WHAT is the relation between high policy and low morals? This is one of the central questions raised by John O'Sullivan's incisive analysis (NR, April 21) of the way in which the academic rebels of the 1960s are turning into the New Class that rules us in the 1990s.

The answer is basically simple: low morals amount to giving in to impulse, and impulsiveness soon lands one in the arms of the bureaucracy.

This means that the United States, like other Western countries, contains two roughly distinct sets of people: those independent souls who manage their own lives -- let us call them the Individualists -- and those whose lives constantly place them in contact with authority in the form of policemen, social workers, prison officers, and so on -- we may call them the Impulsives.

Some examples of Impulsives will be horribly familiar. Promiscuous teenage girls soon find themselves "one-parent families" supervised by a social worker and living on welfare. Those caught with their fingers in the till will soon be keeping the police and prison services in business -- and then probation officers.

Experience shows what the rule is: the permissive society begins in liberation and ends in compulsion. It ends that way because society depends on orderliness, and if it doesn't come from within, it must come from without.

But experience shows something else: that the delightfully liberating social permission that comes with the breaking down of conventions is a Greek gift, a Trojan horse which turns freedom into compulsion.

The cigarette crusade is an interesting example. Even before the 1960s, welfare states began providing free health care to those who needed it. Few who benefited, as they happily puffed away on their cigarettes in those far-off days, could have imagined the anti-tobacco crusade unleashed by governments in the 1990s. But this example reveals the crucial pattern to watch: First, conventions are overthrown. Frustrations are circumvented and deprivations removed by government action. Then, a generation or so later, regulation spreads.

In most Western countries at the turn of the last century, many even of the poorest workers had become involved in low-level schemes of social insurance -- having learned the lessons of prudence from the hard times of the 1890s. Then governments, from generous motives, began to provide pensions, unemployment benefits, housing grants, food stamps, and all the rest.

All of this had important economic consequences, driving up the cost of credit. But it also had fiscal consequences, and in many countries it is leading to a crisis as governments face unfunded liabilities for the upkeep of a rising geriatric population. And one of the first consequences has been the move to make pension provision compulsory.

What began in this century as the moral virtue of prudence thus ended up in the realm of high policy: governments compelling their citizens to save for their retirement. In this case, it might seem as if nothing very serious has changed, yet the individual has lost a small and precious element of responsible freedom.

The loss of this small and precious element is most conspicuous in the realm of sexual conduct. Sex is a relatively weak drive in primitive and poor communities, but it becomes explosive in rich and well-fed societies like our own. The history of the twentieth century has been a ceaseless struggle between inherited conventions which sought to limit sex and channel it, on the one hand, and the liberated impulse which many people found to be the most natural and rational thing, on the other.

It is perhaps odd that sex is not usually advanced as a fundamental human right. The rhetoric in this case has always been the demand for equality, so that what began as marital rights (and therefore conditional) end up universalized. This has been how homosexual rights and sex for the disabled, for example, have moved out of the private realm into public concern. To universalize tends to destroy, and this has been the effect on marriage of universal sexuality.

It is also how Big Brother has made it into the bedroom. Our sexual practices are under heavy surveillance. Governments have decreed sex education in public schools and campaigns to persuade everyone (even, to the amusement of cynics, monogamous husbands and wives) to use condoms. In some countries, they even exhort us to get out there and . . . well, fornicate.

The Health Education Authority in Britain, for example, has come to the conclusion that prudery lies behind Britain's having the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Western Europe. The head of the Family Planning Association, which is associated with the venture, has a philosophy to cover this move. "Sex is a normal, enjoyable part of everyday life," she is reported as saying, "and should be treated as such. Countries with more open attitudes toward sex have lower rates of unplanned pregnancy and studies show that young people are less likely to have early sex if there is good communication about the subject at home. We are emphasizing that sex is fun and talking is the key to a healthy sex life." Or, as advanced Swedes used to say, sexual intercourse was just like having a glass of water.