Ethics and sexual mores

Matt Yglesias responds to David Brooks' riff on Tom Wolfe:

Leaving aside the merits or demerits of the "hook-up culture" or whatever on campus, could it possibly be a matter of such transcendent importance. Leaving aside the merits or demerits of the "hook-up culture" or whatever on campus, could it possibly be a matter of such transcendent importance. Not to get too hyperbolic here, but traditional family life and sexual norms were more-or-less alive and well in Nazi Germany. This business just isn't all that integral to assessing the overall goodness of someone's character. A healthy family life is an excellent thing to have, but it's ultimately a very personal, parochial sort of virtue that doesn't have a huge amount to do with the great issues of the day. Dodgy types can do great things for the world, and upstanding family men can own vast plantations full of chattel slaves.

Sex and dating are obviously topics that are of intense interest to people, so there may as well be books (and newspaper columns) about them, but one shouldn't mistake the fact that these are interesting subjects for the notion that they're all that significant or that good behavior in this regard is the essence of morality.[Emphasis added.]

Nicely put. Even so, I think Matt gives too much credit to Brooks and Wolfe. The issue is not whether you can be a paragon of sexual virtue and a scoundrel. To argue the relative badness of promiscuity vs. war crimes is to accept the conservatives' framework.

These authors aren't just overrating chastity or domesticity in the grand scale of virtues. Like many cultural conservatives, Brooks and Wolfe are completely wrong about ethics. I'm not just arguing that they advocate the wrong norms. I'm alleging that they misunderstand what it means to live a moral life. Wolfe and Brooks seem to be considering morality as a litany of rules (perhaps supernaturally or conventionally ordained rules). Many of their most cherished rules have to do specifically with sex. These commentators take it as a given that sex is morally relevant, per se. They don't bother to argue for that conclusion, they simply assume that restrictive sexual norms are at the heart of any viable moral framework.

It doesn't seem to occur to them that anyone could have a robust and defensible moral code that made no specific reference to sexual behavior. Such moral codes have implications for sexual behavior, but only because sexual choices are governed by more general principles like keeping promises, or promoting happiness, or acting according to a universalizable maxim.

If Tom Wolfe had been looking for stirrings of humanistic moral codes among elite college students, he would have found them. Brooks and Wolfe believe that people who reject traditional sexual norms have opted out of the moral order entirely. This is a self-serving assumption which excuses the authors from grappling with any challenges to their own moral assumptions. It doesn't seem to occur to Wolfe or Brooks that people with alternative codes of conduct follow them for well thought out reasons or that they are prepared to defend their views on principle.

David Brooks assumes that sexually active young people are amoral, confused, or self-destructive. The term "moral suicide" is deeply offensive. Brooks is refusing to acknowledge that other people have sophisticated moral frameworks that could compete with his own in the arena of rational argument. Instead, he prefers to assume that people who disagree with him are stupid or self-deceived. Ironically, this is exactly the attitude that Brooks excoriates liberals for adopting towards exurban social conservatives.

Comments

[Karlo]

Are these moralizers of the same ilk as those who argue for the sanctity of a stem-cell (which is destined for the trash bin anyway) while murdering thousands of Iraqi children?

[Ray]

Perhaps moralists of the stripe who practice a sort of ethical paralipsis: "now, I would never engage in X, but allow me to speak, at great length and in great detail, of how others have done so"--where the condemnation comes in only after the vice has been thoroughly probed. One-handed moralists, you could say.

In other words, did a Girls-Gone-Wild tape finally make its way into Tom Wolfe's hairy palms, and did he then deal with his excitement in the only way his repression allows?

Fie. Who cares about the moral end? The real embarrassment here lies with Wolfe's apparent belief that he's discovered to the world something essential about the mating habits of homo universitus--how hopelessly quaint.

[Charles2]

It's this same framework or pardigm that makes it so difficult to speak to so many on the right - and not just fundamentalists - about "moral issues." Their concepts of moral only include their biblical beliefs and anyone who's moral standings are not based on their particular interpretation of those scriptures is, prima facia immoral.

You can't rationally discuss morality with someone who has already dismissed your framework out of hand.

As for college life - although my choice of university kept me from most of the adventures that Wolfe likley "discovers," those of you who went to "normal" universities can probably say with more knowledge - but hasn't it always been this way? It might be more in the open today, but was it all that different in the 50s or 60s?

[Robin]

It's been a standard theme in the rhetoric or reaction that individuated relationships to sexuality is a bad thing. Foucault's probelms aside, I think that his claim that there is link between domination and the enscription of sexuality within the ambit of morality is true. Brooks once claimed that those who have sex outside of marriage are "spiritually dead"; it's straight out of Falwell speak. It was a common theme of the right during the peak of the feminist movement. And its all designed to serve the maintenace of norms that keep people (women, gays, lesbians, atheists) in their place or out of society altogether.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Hear, hear - absolutely right. Great post.

[david]

Here's a question worth asking: Do these kids participate in the hookup culture (a) because they don't think promiscuity is morally wrong, or (b) because they, like their parents, would agree it's wrong, but just don't care? Lindsay's view that the hookup culture represents an alternative, humanistic moral code which is distinct from the Christian one would seem to presuppose (a). But I'm not sure that's the case for most college students.

Most college students I've met are fairly conventional in most ways. I suspect that they hook up not because they believe it's morally right or permissible for them to do so, but just because they just aren't motivated to act morally. (I would try to explain this lack of motivation in terms of the extension of adolescence in our culture. Adulthood brings with it a sensitivity to moral reasons; delaying adulthood delays sensitivity to moral reasons.) In this way the promiscuity of this generation is different from the promiscuity of, say, the hippies; arguably, the hippies were trying to create and act on a moral code, rather than to simply neglect an (unchallenged) pre-existing code.

[Thad]

David, that's an incredibly condescending and uncharitable view, and IMO it's inaccurate to boot. My undergraduate days were 1993-1997. I also taught as an adjunct from 1999-2000, and then went to grad school from 2000-2002. During that time, I literally did not meet a single student who thought that promiscuity was morally wrong. Obviously, some people thought it was wrong to cheat, or to tease, or to toy with the emotions of others, but nobody believed that a series of mutually consensual commitment-free sexual encounters -- e.g., "hooking up" -- was morally wrong. And anyone who actually articulated such a view would have been regarded as not merely a prude, but actually deranged and out of touch with reality.

This also applies to your larger generalization, that college students aren't motivated to act morally. Again, I call bullshit. Most college students are obsessed with morality. Maybe it manifests itself in ways you don't like, such as militant vegetarianism, or identity politics, or an obsession with "authenticity," or self-conscious radicalism, or fashionable nihilism, or whatever -- but these stances are all motivated by a keen sense of morality. It's usually only after these students graduate and are required to grow up, get a job, and compromise their youthful ideals that the obsession with morality takes a back seat to pragmatism and conventionality.

[david]

Thad,
I suppose a lot of one's perspective on this depends on where you went to college and who you hung out with while you were there.

One bit of evidence which seems to support my view is the often-mentioned fact that a large percentage of college students routinely cheat. I suggest that, if you asked them, even the cheaters would say cheating is wrong. The simplest way to explain this is to say that they just aren't motivated to act morally when it comes to cheating. (Before you say anything, I realize it would be inappropriate to generalize from just this one example.)

I agree that a good number of college students are interested in the lefty projects you listed. I also agree that these projects represent specifically moral concerns. Whether their participation in these projects represents a specifically moral kind of motivation, however, isn't clear to me. (For instance, many of them might be vegetarians in order to fit in, to lose weight, to be healthier, etc.) Also, I'm not sure whether those who participate in those projects represent more than a small but vocal minority of college students.

One last point: You've misinterpreted my comment as endorsing the Christian view of promiscuity. My comment was supposed to be neutral on the question what are the correct norms applying to sex. My main point was just to introduce a distinction between acting contrary to conventional norms because you think the norms are incorrect, and acting contrary to conventional norms because you aren't motivated to follow them - *even though* you agree they are correct. This distinction should be menaingful to you whatever view of the conventional norms you yourself take. I don't think this generation is very thoughtful, on the whole (even though there are certainly many members of it that are); that is why I tend toward the view that (again, on the whole) they unquestioningly accept conventional ethical norms, but ignore them, rather than radically question them and replace them with new ones. (If you want evidence that this generation is not very thoughtful, just look at its favorite music, movies, books...etc.)

[david]

By the way, "cheat" meant cheat on tests, not people, in my comment.

[Dave Reilly]

Excellent post.

Only thing I'd add is that in making their case both Brooks and Wolfe are depending on people taking for granted one thing: that Wolfe is a good novelist and what he's written is a realistic portrayal of campus life.

That means accepting Wolfe's definition of what makes for good fiction---diligent journalism.

Diligent journalism isn't even necessarily the same as accurate journalism let alone good fiction. And I don't think that the journalistic parts of his novel are accurate because Wolfe lacks imagination.

http://lancemannion.typepad.com/lance_mannion/2004/11/tom_wolfe_is_ou.html

I found your site through your post on Matt Yglesias'. Got it bookmarked now. Thank God for Douglas Adams, who was a much greater writer and keener satirist than Wolfe anyday.

[Thad]

One bit of evidence which seems to support my view is the often-mentioned fact that a large percentage of college students routinely cheat [on tests].

Would you guess that the percentage of students that cheat on tests is larger or smaller than the percentage of adults who cheat on their taxes?

Whether their participation in these projects represents a specifically moral kind of motivation, however, isn't clear to me. (For instance, many of them might be vegetarians in order to fit in, to lose weight, to be healthier, etc.)

This is precisely why I used the phrase "militant vegetarianism" instead of just "vegetarianism." The stances I listed are all justified by students in explicitly moral terms -- often painfully earnest and naive moral terms. So the idea that college students, of all people, aren't interested in morality strikes me as absurd in the extreme. College students are the ones who get all hopped up when they first discover Nietzsche, or Sartre, or Brecht, or Ayn Rand, or Andrea Dworkin, or whoever, precisely because the moral dimension in those writers is front-and-center -- and often, unfamiliar and compelling to people who are just beginning to question conventional handed-down morality.

One last point: You've misinterpreted my comment as endorsing the Christian view of promiscuity.

Did I? Where? I'm not sure what I could have said that would have given you that impression.

(If you want evidence that this generation is not very thoughtful, just look at its favorite music, movies, books...etc.)

You mean like Radiohead, Y Tu Mama Tambien, and Everything Is Illuminated? (To name some campus faves from the past few years... ) I'm sorry, but this seems like a lot of condescending knee-jerk "kids ain't what they used to be" bullshit.

[Ray]

College students are not the ones who get all hopped up on this or that author. Some are, sure, but anyone who's attended, visited, or even heard of your average state school knows these places to be hotbeds of conservatism--and willfully ignorant conservatism at that.

No; it certainly can be argued that a great many college students hook up not because they don't consider it immoral (and have actual moral concerns), not because they simply have no moral concerns, but rather because they think it's immoral, and this turns them on.

In short, college, for many, is the moment for piggery.

From the perspective of promiscuous college students who are also conservative, Wolfe doesn't necessarily frame the moral scene incorrectly.

The discussion on Slate brushes up against this:

"Wolfe is unequivocal: Dupont is an institution mentionable in the same breath only with Harvard. And yet, in Wolfe's depiction, it's more like a land grant school crossed with the Thunderdome...Hopeless Structural Flaw No. 1, then, is that Wolfe has somehow run together Harvard with N.C. State, thus producing a complete chimera."

[david]

"Would you guess that the percentage of students that cheat on tests is larger or smaller than the percentage of adults who cheat on their taxes?"

Good point. My guess is yes, but obviously I have no numbers or anything to back it up.

"College students are the ones who get all hopped up when they first discover Nietzsche, or Sartre, or Brecht, or Ayn Rand, or Andrea Dworkin, or whoever, precisely because the moral dimension in those writers is front-and-center..."

Again, a good point, but do you really think *most* college students go through a period of intense interest in writers like these? I agree that that sort of experience is more common among college students than among, say, bus drivers, but I'd still say it applies to only a minority of students.

"Did I? Where? I'm not sure what I could have said that would have given you that impression."

Oops. Sloppy reading on my part.

"I'm sorry, but this seems like a lot of condescending knee-jerk "kids ain't what they used to be" bullshit."

You keep saying I'm being condescending. Maybe I am, but whether I am is irrelevant. I think it's worth considering the possibility that the best explanation of widespread divergence from conventional morality is lack of moral motivation, rather than active reconsideration of the conventional code. Obviously any generalization on this score is going to have exceptions. In some cases, no generalizations will be possible. (This might be one of those cases.)

[Thad]

David, the question is not "Do a majority of college students behave morally?" The question is not "Are questions of morality important to a majority of college students?"

The question is "Is talk about ethics (and metaethics) more prevalent amongst the college student demographic than the population at large?"

There is also a related question, "Are college students more likely than the population at large to self-consciously embrace unconventional moral positions?" Like, for instance, "Meat is murder" or "Gay marriage is a right" or "There's nothing wrong with consensual attachment-free sex."

Now, while admittedly I don't have empirical research to back me up on this, I don't see a lot of Wall Street brokers congregating in coffeehouses vigorously debating the ethics of commodities manipulation, or currency speculation, or whether Bob sold out by signing with Merrill Lynch instead of an indie brokerage firm. (I mean, brokers do congregate in coffeehouses [of sorts], but that's not what they talk about.)

In fact, I don't see much vigorous debate about ethical and metaethical issues anywhere except college campuses. [Bible study groups may talk about "values" and such but it's not my impression that there's a great deal of internal debate going on -- and certainly nothing about metaethics. "Values" come from God, end of story.]

You keep saying I'm being condescending.

What else would you call a statement like "the young generation clearly isn't thoughtful because I don't happen to like the music they listen to"?

I know it's always fun to rant about "those damn kids" and the general decline of society, etc., but can I remind people that the 18-29 demographic is the only one that actually went for Kerry? (And by a ten-point margin, too.)

[david]

Thad,

This discussion is really suffering from an overabundance of stereotypes. I suppose that's necessary, though - the only alternative would be to actually consult empirical research, which I'm too lazy to do!

Let's call the kids who hang out in coffeehouses and talk about moral questions like whether meat is murder "the lefty crowd." I'll grant, for the sake of argument, your claim that members of the lefty crowd are indeed motivated to act morally - but this is only a subgroup of all college kids. Among other subgroups, there's also a well-known, good-sized subgroup which we might call the "frat crowd." Members of this group probably don't hang out in coffeehouses and probably don't spend much time thinking about the moral questions that are so interesting to the lefty crowd. I don't imagine most of them are especially interested in thinking through any moral questions at all. This should mean that the typical frat guy(/girl) is likely to accept conventional answers to moral questions, since generally people accept conventional answers to questions they haven't thought through for themselves. But somehow I suspect that despite having answers to moral questions in hand, your typical frat guy/girl isn't all that motivated to behave morally.

One bit of evidence for thinking this way about the frat crowd: There's apparently a big problem with rape on college campuses. (Just recently I got an e-mail that was sent to the entire student body here at Wisconsin. One of the items in the e-mail was a thinly veiled a reminder not to rape anybody!) Wild guess: It's members of what I'm calling "the frat crowd" who are doing most of the raping. But I bet if you asked the typical frat-crowd rapist whether raping is wrong, he'd probably say yes (if he were sincere). The problem with rape isn't a problem of knowing right from wrong; it's a problem of caring what is right and what is wrong.

So generally, there are probably two big subgroups of college kids: The frat group, which is morally conventional, but morally unmotivated; and the lefty group, which is unconventional and motivated. Now return to the behavior we were originally trying to explain: "Hooking up." Where's all this hooking up supposed to be happening? Is it happening in cofeehouses or at frat parties? Or neither, or both?

[rob loftis]

Thad and David: It is so clear you guys are talking past each other because you are talking about different students at different institutions. My guess: david works at a big public insitution in a red state, thad works at a private institution in a blue state.

I taught at Red State Tech for a long time, and I can tell you, there aren't many fans of Y Tu Mama Tambien there. I had students stand up in class and say that gays were disgusting and should be shot. I had two students in the same semester write essays arguing that the bible forbids smoking tobacco.

I'm tempted to go so far as to say that there are no intersting generalizations you can make about a generation. People love to say things like "kids today are so much more computer literate than their parents." Not at schools where substantial portions of the student body are the first in their family to attend college. "Kids today are attracted to militant vegetarianism and radiohead." Not at texas tech university, where 70% of the student body attend a christian church weekly.

Decades of social commentary on the baby boom generation have people thinking that birth cohort is a significant predictor of moral attidutes. But it is completely swamped by more standard predictors like parents level of education, geography, and religion.

[Thad]

Hi Rob,

I actually don't work in academia anymore (I was only an adjunct for a year). And you are right that I don't really know what things are like at Red State Tech. But Red State Tech is only part of the story.

Anyway, I think you and David are both missing my point, which is merely this:

There are amoral assholes -- frat boy types -- in every age demographic. There are people who are not reflective about ethics and metaethics in every age demographic. There are philistines in every age demographic.

However, I would submit that the one demographic in which you are likely to see substantial numbers of people who do think about and talk about -- often passionately -- morality, ethics, aesthetics, etc., is the 18-29 year-old bracket.

Note that this isn't the same thing as saying that a majority of people in the 18-29 demographic are like that -- just more than in the population at large.

[rob loftis]

>However, I would submit that the one demographic >in which you are likely to see substantial >numbers of people who do think about and talk >about -- often passionately -- morality, ethics, >aesthetics, etc., is the 18-29 year-old bracket.

ok. Fair enough.

We've gotten away from the juicy sex stuff that drew me to this thread in the first place, though.

The question was whether 'hook up culture' is driven by an alternative morality or by immorality. I stand by the claim that although there is lots of sex on college campuses everywhere, what is driving it will vary depending on other social factors. At a lot of schools with a reputation as "party schools" what you see is not an alternative morality but the old double standard playing itself out. Female promescuity is taboo, while male promiscuity is quietly encouraged. Women hook up with men to get acceptance, but then find they are ostricized.

Linsay, in her original post, suggested that people outside of David Brooks' world see sexual ethics in terms of external principles, like promise keeping or promiting happiness. That is certainly the way I see sexual ethics. That is probably the way a lot of my students here at Small Liberal Arts University see sexual ethics. But I wouldn't generalize past that.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Tom Wolfe's novel is based on fieldwork at elite private schools and set in a fictional Ivy League college in Pennsylvania. Originally, I said that I would have expected him to find stirrings of a more humanistic morality among elite college students.

[Ray]

Right. Well; then I guess I'll quote it again, from the Slate discussion:

"Wolfe is unequivocal: Dupont is an institution mentionable in the same breath only with Harvard. And yet, in Wolfe's depiction, it's more like a land grant school crossed with the Thunderdome...Hopeless Structural Flaw No. 1, then, is that Wolfe has somehow run together Harvard with N.C. State, thus producing a complete chimera."

Fine. What the hell does Wolfe mean by doing this? Perhaps he simply doesn't see the distinction? Or he has purposefully jammed the two cultures together in order to provide himself with a specially misshapen figure for his critique of contemporary sexuality.

Wolfe is either too ignorant or too determined to explore or even to recognize the possibilities of other moralities at elite institutions.

Of course, the more forgiving among us may want to say that it is a possibility (however remote) that such refined sensibilities could exist--in a less-evolved form, naturally--at non-elite institutions.

For my part, I maintain that if it is Wolfe's intention to tell us that precisely the sort of indulgences we expect from State U. have a place in the privies as well and in great measure, then the subject of his expose has long been over-exposed. And that a suspicion of self-titillation is not undue.

In other words, how can it really matter that the institution is elite?

[Dave Reilly]

Ray,

I think what might have happened in IACS is the same thing that happened with A Man in Full, and it's a flaw as a writer that Wolfe pretty much admits to in one of the essays in Hooking Up.

Wolfe can't bring himself to throw anything away. Whatever Wolfe the journalist hands over, Wolfe the novelist feels he has to make use of. And Wolfe the journalist is way too hard working for both Wolfes' own goods.

He ends up cramming everything he knows into one book, even if it doesn't really belong in that book. What he should do is write more books. That is, he needs to see that he has in hand material for three different novels on the same theme and write three novels. That's what his supposed hero Balzac did.

A smarter novelist would have given us Charlotte Simmons' undergraduate career at a Division I basketball factory in one book, her graduate career at an Ivy League or sub-Ivy school in another, and, possibly, her post-grad career at some West Coast research powerhouse, just to cover all bases, in a third. I'm not sure the world needs three books on college life by Tom Wolfe, but that would have solved the structural flaw the guy at Slate identified.

[Thad]

I'm not sure the world needs three books on college life by Tom Wolfe

Sweet Jeebus. The world needs that like it needs three installments of "Rod Stewart Sings The Great American Songbook."

[david]

I saw him on the daily show, and he was kind of funny...

[Swopa]

Yeah, whatever you think of his music, Rod's got a decent sense of humor.

[david]

No, I was talking about Sweet Jeebus.