Anthony Esolen: The Age of Credulity

August 20,2008
Touchstone

Excerpt:
I was a boy once, and have watched children playing, all my life long. I was taught that boys and girls are different, in ways that I'd come to find sometimes frustrating but usually delightful, and that bit of folksy wisdom jived with what I saw of them. But now I am supposed to believe that in every culture known to man, at every stage of technological development, and often quite independent of one another, boys invent rough games, organize themselves into teams or gangs, and worship heroes, and that this is all a matter of cultural conditioning and could be completely otherwise; but when some grown man wants to dress up as a bride and saunter down the aisle with another grown man, and sow seed where seed don't go, now that is natural, nay, absolutely determined by the jeans, I mean genes. I can't believe that.

When I was a kid, people used to call it a "tragedy" if a child lost his mother or father, by death or divorce. That seemed about right to me; I knew a couple of those kids. But now one of my colleagues, a nominal Catholic, unmarried, has adopted a healthy little boy to raise as her own, without a father. I am supposed to believe that this is a wonderful thing, and throw a party. I can't believe it, as I cannot believe that our children of divorce and of shacking up are just fine, not hurt by it, no, not a bit. It would take a long and tedious post for me to recount what divorce and shacking up has done to just the families of our five or six closest friends in Canada; but I am supposed to ignore all of that, and believe, with a toss of the head, that marriage would have been worse. I have seen, closely, marriages that were terrible; and I have seen rotten husbands and wives grow even worse because of the possibility of divorce. I have seen them go on and make other people's lives miserable, like free radicals ranging through the system. I am supposed to ignore it, and believe, just believe. the rest