What brought society to this?

       

 

Comments.    Considerations.     Questions.

 

                                      by Kenneth Bagnell

               

    An ancient proverb from the oriental world comes back to me as I think of Ashley-Madison, the Canadian based agency that, so it claims, discreetly provides sexual partners for married people. “Step by step,” goes the old proverb, “one goes a long way.” I mean that the creation of such a crude service did not just pop into the imagination of an amoral opportunist. It’s the outcome of numerous social changes of the past century. Since I am now in my early 80s, and have a reasonable long term memory, I’ve spent a week or more pondering some of the issues and incidents that might be landmarks that led society to the creation and affirmation of such agencies with all the consequences of indignation, humiliation and heartbreak that the current disclosures are bringing. (But one example: an American theological professor, ordained minister of a conservative denomination and father of eight has been exposed. He admits he signed but claims – I take his word– that he never actually utilized the dating service. No matter, his ministry may well be over.)

 

      I was about ten, when in my hometown in eastern Canada, I read, in the local newspaper, a brief article headed, “Local man charged for wife-swapping.” That was probably around 1945, an era when our values and mores, maybe especially in the Maritimes, were quite traditional: the churches mostly filled, the scriptures taken seriously including the commandments, maybe especially the one: “thou shalt not commit adultery.” That, as today’s cliche has it, was then. A few years later, about 1949, I had a Saturday job at the local bookstore where I soon noticed that the most rapidly selling product was a Toronto based tabloid named “Flash,” and next to it was one called “Hush.” Each had back pages with classified ads inviting the very activity that shocked me when I was ten. It was becoming acceptable. Why?

       I believe such an activity was but an early — perhaps first — public indication of the birth of secularity: the waning of religious faith as an influential dimension of the life of both individuals and the collective culture. What brought it on?  In my view at least in large part, the two World Wars: 1914 to 1918; and 1939 to 1945.  Millions upon Millions died in the military conflicts and in the second war, six million Jews perished in Hitler’s ovens. These years shook the foundations. How, the world asked, could a merciful God permit such a vast unspeakable horror?  Moreover, numerous Christian scholars, particularly those in Europe, including the renowned Karl Barth, were deeply distressed to find that some — not all but many — German theological professors were fascistic: “I suddenly realized,” Barth is recorded as saying, “that I could no longer follow either their ethics or their understanding of the Bible.” That’s but one example of many that illustrate the proverbial “shaking of the foundations” of faith as early as the years of the First World War. (Moreover when married couples are apart for years, fidelity may not be easy.)  The major cause of the depth of despair and the loss of faith was in the numbers: the First World War cost 17 million lives, The Second World War, over 60 million. No matter how insightful and assuring the theology may have been, the world began its doubt how such horror could occur in a world overseen by a merciful God.

    Then, after the two wars, came the challenge to Judeo and Christian moral customs: the 1960s. Lifestyle books are often a reflection of public mores, take as a telling example, one that reflected the sexual revolution of that decade. It appeared just after the 1960s, and thereby mirrors somewhat startling changes of the social change of that historic decade. It’s called Open Marriage, by a wedded scholarly couple, Nena and George O’ Neil. It was very widely read, being on the major bestselling lists 40 weeks and selling roughly 35 million copies, a fact which in itself, revealed the changing times. Its content, as I recall reviewing it on a CBC Radio program, is not entirely what the title suggests, but it does devote a sizeable portion to advocating what the title implies: the right to have sexual relationships with someone other than your marriage partner. The reviews emphasized that aspect and thereby spread endorsement of the now, not exactly common but in some circles, quite familiar open marriage. After all it’s all legal. So, along with it have come the other sexual adventures including in almost every sizable city, clubs for anyone who pays the modest admission fee.

 

      So open marriage is, to me, leaning a bit toward social conservatism, not admirable. Moreover most of us stood before family and friends and took the vow of fidelity. But I do realize that open marriage as well as many other diversions are legal and now becoming socially acknowledged as such.  Moreover, on the scale of wrong doing, open marriage dims when compared to the world tragedy we now read, hear and see, capsulated in the image of the dead child on the watery sands of the sea. He, his brother and parents, hoped desperately to cross four kilometres, from a shore of Turkey to a Greek island and its freedom. The mother and the children drowned. “Everything I was dreaming is gone” he said, “I want to bury my family and sit beside them until I die.” It’s important to put the subject just dealt with in the context of these deeply sad days.

    It helped me a day or so ago to speak with a reflective friend, Rev. Don Gillies, whom I’ve known for over a half century. He holds, among other degrees, a doctorate from Boston University, an Ivy League institution and for many years headed a Toronto counselling centre. (Pastoral counselling has been his specialty.) When I asked how he viewed the subject of Open Marriage, he paused awhile, then said that it might help if we all viewed it with a dash of humour: “I need,” he stressed, “to recognize that for some it has painful consequences. But I enjoyed a Toronto Star’s columnist report that she had shared with her husband the possibility that she might be on that dreadful list, since she had tried, as a journalist, to find out more by making an inquiry! Apparently her husband laughed when he heard it and went on reading his morning paper. Now that’s a marriage!” His perspective is right. It recalls what a deceased acquaintance, a then well known Catholic priest, said to me years ago: “Sex? It’s only a little better than an ice cream cone on a hot summer day.”

 

All past blogs are archived on my website: your comments are welcome there: www.kennethbagnell.com.