Libido dominandi E. Michael Jones
Unlike the standard version of the sexual revolution, Libido Dominandi shows how sexual liberation was from its inception a form of control. Those who wished to liberate man from the moral order needed to impose social controls as soon as they succeeded because liberated libido led inevitably to anarchy. Aldous Huxley wrote in his preface to the 1946 edition of Brave New World that “as political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase.” This book is about the converse of that statement. It explains how the rhetoric of sexual freedom was used to engineer a system of covert political and social control. Over the course of the two-hundred-year span covered by this book, the development of echnologies of communication, reproduction, and psychic control – including psychotherapy, behaviorism, advertising, sensitivity training, pornography, and plain old blackmail – allowed the Enlightenment and its heirs to turn Augustine’s insight on its head and create masters out of men’s vices. Libido Dominandi is the story of how that happened.I have not read this book, or Dr. Jones's The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing, but I did read his John Cardinal Krol and the Cultural Revolution, and he advances many of the same theses in this earlier work, though more limited in scope, applying them to the history of Philadelphia. In The Slaughter of Cities he includes Philadephia, along with Boston, Detroit, and Chicago. From a flyer for the book:
In his meticulously documented book, he proves that urban renewal had more to do with ethnicity than it ever had to dowith design or hygiene or blight. Urban renewal was the last-gasp attempt of the WASP ruling class to take control of acountry that was slipping out of its grasp for demographic reasons. The largely Catholic ethnics were to be driven out of their neighborhoods into the suburbs, where they were to be “Americanized” according to WASP principles. The neighborhoods they left behind were to be turned over to the sharecroppers from the South or turned into futuristic Bauhaus enclaves for the new government elites. Using political tactics like eminent domain and “integration,” the planners made sure that the ethnic neighborhood gottransformed into something more congenial to their dreams of social engineering than the actual communities of people as a threat to their control. Jones concentrates on four cities – Philadelphia, Chicago,Detroit, and Boston – in a book whose conclusions will be shocking and controversial. The destruction of the ethnic neighborhoods that made up the human, residential heart of these cities was not an unfortunate by-product of a well-intentioned plan that somehow went awry; it was part of the plan itself.I think he makes a persuasive case in the Cardinal Krol book; I don't know if he overextends in the other two; certainly one gets the vibe of a conspiracy-mindset from the author, but perhaps the case for a conspiracy is stronger than it may appear to the average American, who is rather ignorant of elites and the arrangements they make among themselves.
As Aristotle noted, reason can be corrupted by desire (unrestrained desire adopted in vice). Is it easier to control someone who does not possess the use of reason and cannot function as a citizen in a polity? Perhaps. An Aristotelian might even make the claim that such individuals are naturally fitted to be slaves. St. Paul, St. Augustine, and undoubtedly many of the Church Fathers talk about something like being a slave to sin, and how sin prevents us from being truly free. But how far will a corrupt generation be willing to serve its masters? Wouldn't it be difficult to give them direction? It seems that the application of force would be necessary sooner or later.
Still, pandering to their appetites succeeds in distracting them from the real problems at hand, and puts them in such a state that they have no interest in effecting real political and social reform. If people are too busy chasing after sex, they won't have much time and energy for anything else, nor will they have the character to seek higher goods.
But perhaps Dr. Jones focuses too much on the 20th century and on sex. Does not society have a host of other vices, including excessive consumption and materialism? Was decline already put in motion through industrialization and the rise of a centralized, no longer Federal, government? He might argue that the elites used the tools they had in order to gain control, and thereby making the problem worse. Only God knows the complete truth.
With the destruction of local communities and local culture, the entertainment industries produced "art" and marketed it to the people.
Dr. Jones would argue that music and the mass media have corrupted the people, and how many conservatives would disagree? The change in music and social dance forms indicate that some sort of change in the character of society has taken place. As I listen to trance while I am writing this, I should remark that trance and electronic are sensual, just like certain forms of Latin American music (and I would argue that the sensual quality is not due to the Spanish character, but to the assimilation of African culture and music). If the festive music of a community is closely linked to fertility celebrations and rituals, we should not be surprised if it features certain characteristics and invokes certain responses in us. Can the music itself make chastity more difficult? It seems that it can. (If we add to the music an environment where alcohol is present, such as a club, and people mix freely without supervision and can indulge in their desires so long as there are consenting adults, chastity easily goes out the window. What would St. Francis de Sales say about our contemporary dance clubs and bars?)
Some Americans tend to have the view that youth culture started in America and spread elsewhere, including Europe. Certainly, American popular culture has been marketed overseas and had an impact there. But it also seems to me that a youth culture (and the fragmentation of communities into different generations having limited social contact with one another) arose independently in Europe. Only if someone acquainted with European social history could describe what was going on in Europe during the late 19th century and early 20th.
As industralization and urbanization has spread to other countries (particularly countries in Latin America), we witness the same sort of trends with regards to the culture and mores of those societies. In a city that is too large, traditional culture cannot survive long.
