Horror: The Revolt of Conscience

Tonight, the second season of American Horror Story begins. I thought last season was an excellent, though perhaps unintended , cultural acknowledgement that along with sexual “liberation” come unintended consequences – particularly regret of voluntary sterility. The realities of biology and human reason are fundamentally uninterested in the dreams of unconstrained desire, of self-defined and self-policed sexual license and identity. The end of such a self is destruction and damnation, especially from the cold loneliness of birth control and abortion. Here is true and lasting horror: a subverted sexual revolution, an intimacy disconnected from innate moral order, a terrifying emptiness of disposability, disease, and death. A refusal to confess before God means confession before men, and this is American pop cultural horror. Humans, more rationalizing than rational, have devolved modernity into rationalized lust. The revolt of conscience drives horror fiction.