When Truth is Abandoned

“Creation of Adam” (detail) by Michelangelo

Merchants of Death — Alfred C. Kinsey

I recently came across an article on Mercatornet.com which introduced me to an interview of Camille Paglia in Spiked, a British publication. Ms. Paglia is a radical feminist and lesbian who isn’t afraid to go counter to the “mainstream” politically correct views dictated for acceptance today. In the course of the interview she said the following about college students:

“They have no sense of the great patterns of world history, the rise and fall of civilisations like Babylon and Rome that became very sexually tolerant, and then fell. If you’ve had no exposure to that, you can honestly believe that ‘There is progress all around us and we are moving to an ideal state of culture, where we all hold hands and everyone is accepted for what they are … and the environment will be pure…’ – a magical utopian view that we are marching to perfection. And the sign of this progress is toleration – of the educated class – for homosexuality, or for changing gender, or whatever.

“To me it’s a sign of the opposite, it’s symptomatic of a civilisation just before it falls: ‘we’ are very tolerant, not passionate, but there are bands of vandals and destroyers circling around the edge of our civilisation who will bring it down.”[i]

In the course of this series we have seen how ideas introduced into the intellectual current five hundred years ago have followed their logical trajectory and have come to their final conclusion. Beginning with Nominalism and the Protestant Revolt, through Machiavelli and the Enlightenment and ending in modern ideologies we are now in a post-Christian, post-modern era of mass apostasy from God. In previous articles on Sigmund Freud and Margaret Mead we saw that in the twentieth century we had moved from the realm of ideology to the promulgation of pseudo-scientific “findings” as a justification for abandoning millennia of Judeo-Christian morality in favour of sexual promiscuity. This movement received its final impetuous from the writings of another pseudo-scientist.

Alfred C. Kinsey

Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956) was a man who was so deviant and who sanctioned activities that were so vile that it is a wonder that he wasn’t imprisoned for what he had done. I will not get into the details of his personal activities. If people are interested they can reference the endnotes below but, note that the contents are not suitable for younger readers. [ii]

Kinsey was a Harvard educated expert on the gall wasp. In 1947, he established The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction. The institute, often called The Kinsey Institute, still exists in Bloomington, Indiana, where it was first founded.

In writing his chapter on Kinsey, Dr. Benjamin Wiker, Ph.D., notes that he was refused permission to quote Kinsey directly. He opens his chapter by writing:

“… The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction will not allow me to quote anything. This is both aggravating and revealing.

“It is aggravating because I assumed (according to the usual custom with publishers and copyright holders), that I would be granted permission, so I had written the chapter some moths before publication of my book. I filled it with direct quotes from Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior for the obvious reason that an author ought to be judged by his own words.

“That brings us to the revealing part. The Kinsey Institute refused me permission to quote from Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male. Evidently, the Institute does not want its namesake to be judged by his own words. As with Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood – my addition) Kinsey’s own words are a public embarrassment. To be blunt, the Kinsey Institute is censoring its own man…” [iii]

Kinsey used scientific sounding data and used detailed charts and graphs to present a picture of what men really do in the area of sex. His book became required reading in universities and the contents of his book were used to change the criminal code to make it more lenient in regards to sexual crimes.[iv]

Kinsey’s “research” was based on interviewing men regarding their sexual activities to provide the raw data. The problem, however, is that he didn’t randomly ask men from across the country and from every walk of life. His interview pool included several hundred male prostitutes, 25% of the pool were sex offenders or had been in prison for other reasons, and “the interviewers purposely sought out the ‘rarer’ types of imprisoned sex offenders to give the impression that deviancy was normal.” [v] One of the results of this skewed pool was that Kinsey could “prove” that homosexual activity occurred among 10-30% of the population.

I mentioned above that Kinsey should have been arrested when this book was first published. Wiker writes:

“It is a wonder that Kinsey wasn’t arrested after the publication of his infamous Report, as not a few pages are dedicated to the affirmation of pre-adolescent sexuality, using the data gathered from the histories of men who had sexual contacts with younger boys.” [vi]

Wiker concludes his chapter on Kinsey saying:

“So there we have Kinsey. Of course, he undermined any notion that pre-marital sex and adultery were wrong using the very same kind of reasoning. Since it all appeared so scientific, and we wanted to hear it, Kinsey’s pseudo-science became foundational for the sexual revolution, used both in courts and classrooms to push a limitless sexual revolution that began in the 1960s and through which we are still living. This revolution will not be over until it has overthrown all sexual boundaries, which means that it will not be complete until it extinguished all opposition, the greatest of which is Christianity. Once again, we see atheism at the root of rebellion.” [vii]

As we saw with Margaret Mead, the desire by people in the West to “liberate” themselves from the “commandments” of God and Church eagerly accepted the “scientific” findings of Alfred Kinsey. Even though his methodology was quickly revealed to be unscientific, there wasn’t enough interest to pay heed.

Ideas Have Consequences

St. Thomas Aquinas once wrote (and I paraphrase), “A small error in the beginning will result in a much larger error at the end.” When we deviate even a small degree from objective, universal, reality we will eventually end up where we are now, in a sea of confusion, dysfunction and even death.

In my original series, I spoke of the change that occurred when philosophers no longer accepted Universals as real but rather chose to accept Nominalism which defines all things in their particular instances. As a result of this shift, we soon see the abandonment of objective moral truths.

Machiavelli wrote that we should no longer ask what men “ought” to do but rather to see what men “actually” do. This results in realpolitik, managing what men do so that what is pragmatic and practical can be achieved rather than striving for some ideal that is unreal and unattainable. Of course, God’s Will and the moral teaching of the Church are just the sort of “ideal” that can never be attained. (We can see this culminating in Kinsey who said, in effect, this is what men are really like so let’s have the laws reflect that reality instead of the repressive Judeo-Christian expectation.)

Descartes separated the body and the mind which led to the abandonment of the spirit and the focusing on the material. Hobbes and Rousseau presented us with humanity in some primordial “state of nature” that was alternately either brutish and short (Hobbes) or a sexually idyllic Eden (Rousseau). John Stuart Mill argued that pleasure and pain are the only determining factors in calculating moral truths while Darwin showed us to be simply a process of random evolution driven by the survival of the fittest.

Nietzsche abandoned all pretext of God and Morality by declaring God to be Dead and that all humans are governed by a Will to Power which, if unshackled from the slave morality of Judeo-Christian suppression will result in the manifestation of the “superman”, the authors of the master morality.

Marx led the way to political upheaval while Lenin and Hitler (who I did not cover) put the god-less philosophy of those who went before them into political practice at the cost of so many millions of lives. Sanger put Darwinian thought into practice by advocating social Darwinism through the elimination of “the unfit” with, again, millions of lives lost through abortion.

In the more personal realm we see the god-less philosophies impact upon sexual morality. Freud leads us back to the Hobbesian “state of nature” prior to its suppression by religion so as to free us from that illusion. Mead channels Hobbes and Rousseau by seeking to present a modern day, idyllic, pre-religious sexual paradise by misrepresenting the people of Samoa.

Kinsey is the last hitter in the batting order, using scientific language and statistics to misrepresent what men “really do” (as Machiavelli would say) so as to change what men “ought” to do.

We cannot help to see, when looking back through history, the long, steady and ever-widening “highway to hell” that post-Christian Western Civilization now finds itself. We are, I think, at the culmination of a great apostasy. Anything from this point on is merely an afterword, for the abandonment of God is, for all intents and purposes, complete.

Ideas have consequences and bad ideas have bad consequences. I recall reading a statement by Pope St. John Paul II saying that “error must run its course.” Let us pray that the course of error will soon be over so that sanity can once again prevail.

Acknowledgement

I want to reiterate again my dependence on the excellent writing of Dr. Benjamin Wiker. While I had come to many of the same conclusions as he did prior to reading his book it was never in the depth and scope to which he so carefully laid it out. If there are any errors in my writings the fault is wholly mine.