Selective Discipline

We live with interesting dissonances.

For example, it’s fascinating that young people now accept economic discipline with little protest. That’s something I wouldn’t have predicted when I was in college when people still worried about being imprisoned in what Weber called the “iron cage.” But at the same time our age rejects sexual discipline as inhumane.

Another example: Most Ivy League students are likely to admit that many Americans aren’t able to participate in the lucrative global economy. They just don’t have what it takes, as it were. But mention gay marriage and they suddenly become proponents of a strict equality, viewing with great dismay my belief that two men “just don’t have what it takes” to get married.

In both cases our era believes very sincerely and deeply in the supposedly inviolable laws of economics, while rejecting as absurd the natural law. We’re docile to the marketplace and in rebellion against our bodies.

It’s unsurprising, I suppose. As Pascal recognized, it’s our fate to work at cross purposes and live against ourselves.