Transcripts For CSPAN2 In 20240703 : vimarsana.com

CSPAN2 In July 3, 2024

Revisited. Host author Mary Eberstadt author Mary Eberstadt why are there two versions of your book adam and eve after the pill and adam and eve after the pill revisited . Care to books peter. The first one written about 10 years ago called adam and eve after the pill was what i call a microscopic look at the effects of the revolution to individuals with men, women, children and a decade later adam and eve after the pill revisited which is a macrotopic of the revolution on politics on society and christianity itself. So the aperture has been widened. What are some of those macrotrends . Well its a long story. Lets try to do the short version here. D ive been interested for a long and tracing the fault lines that are beneath society as you know it. Im not a reporter, i dont look at the surface. I tried to get underneath the trends that are transforming our these trends is the sexual revolution and the concomitant of christianity which begins really in the early 1960s. What is the effect of these combined trends . One thing that has happened his families have gotten smaller. Families are more broken than they used to be and many people live alone who didnt use to and this has been a transformative effect on our world. We can talk in more detail about that one but the collapse of the family has meant that we are sending more and more people into the world that dont havedi experiences with the primal community, the community of the family and this i think is what we talk about on the surface. We talk about the divisiveness of our politics. When we talk about the fact that people seem polarized and at each others throats to do believe underneath that are the accumulated factors of six decades now that it resulted in children who are less socialized and resulted in people who know less about each others human beings because they didnt get that practice in families. We are going to show headline from the Boston Herald in 1960 and thisto is about the fda approving the contraceptive pill. You can see it right there in the screen. In your view, that event changed the world. Is that fair to say . I think it was the mostt transformative thing that happened since eve took the apple in the garden of eden and the reason is that transformed relations between men and women first of all. We to go back to the early 1960s to realize that people thought this would be a positive thing. They thought giving more people power over their fertility, they thought it would strengthen society because women would be able to join the workforce in droves if they did. They are no longer tied to large families. Something strange happened during the next few years. Instead of strengthening marriage it looked as if contraception had a destructive effect. Suddenly divorces skyrocketed and cohabitation also skyrocketed. Abortion quickly became legal and there were millions and millions of those. So what happened here . Why was this thing that was supposed to liberate humanity having such a negative effect . Secular economists have looked at this and they have concluded that what happened was the Birth Control pill meant that men were no longer responsible. There was no such thing as a shotgun wedding which is a fate that some listeners may not have heard of but it refers to the fact that if a woman got pregnant the man was typically held responsible. Birth control is a gamechanger this way because it meant women were held accountable usually exclusively whether or not they became pregnant was the womans problem and a womans issue. , simultaneously a course that made them and less relevant in the situation. There is a wonderful sociologist named lionel who wrote the book called the decline of males over 20 years ago when he argues the pill had essentially sideline men. They werent needed anymore. Only women were in control of theirhe fertility. So these are seismic changes in the relationship and today when we talk about the problem with men for what to do about all of these men i think what we are seeing in substantiation of this trend that im describing begins in the early 1960s. Mary eberstadt you ride in adam and eve after the pill revisited you ride that since the pill was introduced there has been a rise in abortion and unwanted pregnancy rates p thats a paradoxical effect but thats why my first book adam and eve after the pill revisited talks about the paradoxes of the sexual revolution. A lot of this fallout was unexpected and talking about the sexual revolution peter i want to make clear im not being monocausal. Thats a bad word. Im not saying theres one cause or the deterioration we are seeing around us is what im saying is that is the one cause that has not been stressed sufficiently in sociology or by Church Leaders or by others in authority. Its a thing thats hardest to talk about and i think we need to talk about it because splitting the human adam the way that we did in the 1960s and beyond is led to one of the worst problems of their time. A quote from adam and eve after the pill revisited just to give viewers an idea of the themes you are talking about in the book. You can expand on any of them you want. Dates are very short quotes. The sexual revolution in dewars is a force of modernity. Second back six decades of social science have established the most efficient way to increase dysfunction is to increase fatherlessness. The third quote, christian believers are in open railing Uncharted Waters and finally posts 1960s disorder was generating casualties of all kinds. Anything there youd like to expand on . All of it. Id like to start with the idea of casualty because everyone knows these subjects are difficult to discuss. Everyone has lived in some kind of family that have been affected by all of the trends under discussion i raised the trend of fatherlessness and are not trying to point fingers or make people feel bad that im trying to connect the dots so the generations that come next might suffer a little less from the trends that we are describing. After the first adam and eve book came out over 10 years ago there was one thing that surprised me which was the emotional resonance of the book. This was not a selfhelp book. This was a undertaking to discuss the effectski of social revolution and anthropology and ito had nothing to do with theology and none of my book depends on theology at all. Im not a theologian but i was very surprised the leaders who got in touch by email and otherwise to say this chapter on really resonate with me. Let me tell you the story of how it destroyed my marriage. For example and there were harder stories that i heard from all over. So the thesis that the sexual revolution was having negative consequences that were not well understood seems to be vindicated by these personal stories, these broad testimonials for people to talk about how they were worried about raising their child without a father for example. So theres a lot of emotional resonance and intensity that i didnt expect it was part of why i continue to look at that subject in the second. Mary eberstadt Cameron Dicker bugs you talk about a high schoolgirl who was pregnant and it was quite a scandal and today that doesnt rate and eyeblink. Thats a snapshot that tells us how the world changed after orthe 1960s. The story goes like this, i grew up in broome upstate new york in the small town and down the street at one point was a young teenager who got pregnant and it was the talk of the neighborhood because the father was a young soldier returned from vietnam did not intend to marry her. That is to say the scandal was not about her. What was thought was that she was a single mother. She went away and have the baby to return to school and there wasch no social programs. To my knowledge it was directed at her. 20 years later i went back and was talking to a former teacher and she said a third of the girls graduating high school that year were pregnant great none of them were married. In this 20 year gap i think we see what was repeated in america this story by the millions were no longer waswh it thought pregnancy was something that two people were responsible for present mymy only one person usually a frightened young woman was responsible for. And that was a step backwards. How did you get from rube mark grimm new york to washington . Well i was very fortunate. I went to Cornell University on a scholarship and after that i thought maybe id like to be a philosophy professor and i double majored in philosophy and government but i decided to take the year off and to make a long story short i started riding and i got involved in new york journalism especially in smaller intellectual magazines that are not the same today that they were back then. Back then in the 1980s there was Public Interesting commentary. They were very exciting places towe ride for you to hang out ad in and i ended up an assistant editor in the Public Interest magazines by Irving Kristol a legendary writer and from there i ended up doing riding for major officials in the reagan administration. One was Jeane Kirkpatrick the investor to the United Nations and from there ended up speechwriting for secretary of state George Shultz for two years. What is your fulltime job currently . We have four children and there is. I did very little riding. 15 years they were growing up and once they were in school i s came back. You are with a pink tank now argue . Im im a Senior Research fellow at the institute and to hold a chair Information Center in washington d. C. Is it fair to say you are practicing catholic . I try. Stemem the forward of your most recent book adam and eve after the pill revisited was written by cardinal stomach Cardinal George pell of australia was a great intellectual and spiritual leader and i will not pretend that i knew him well. But he was kind enough to take an interest in some of my riding. We had corresponded about some of the scenes in my book. For example one thing that caught his eye with a minute patient that i wrote about the theme of chaos. In 1930 when the great novelist converted to catholicism he who was asked by newspaper why he did that. He just throughout this line and he said because in our civilization now the choice is between christianity and chaos. Now the chaos of his time was very different. In the 1930s he entered the war period and there was political chaos and carnage of the 20th century and world war ii. The chaos in our time was very different and yet weff are seeig it in more detail than what was specified so i wrote an essay about that outlying intellectual chaos, chaos within the idea itself and Cardinal George powell because of that essay and they offered to ride a forward for the book. Cardinal pell went on to ride teaching over the years has been coherent and consistent. What did he mean by that . Well he meant the Catholic Church stood as a quote sign of contradiction in the world and whatever was going on around it, it would continue the same teachings. Its teachings go all the way back. When jesus tells the disciples unlike the jewish people his people are not allowed to divorce for example. The disciples were the first to complain that these are hard subjects but theres consistency that draws people in. All of the things available to the romans you name it, divorce etc. Were put offlimits and this teaching has not changed. Of course we talk about mercy because those are also teachings but the idea that human beings if they were were being held to a higher standard is consistent and justice that idea has repelled many people and that many people are all of the centuries it has also drawn others in. I want to go back to quote we read earlier and talk about this. Christian believers are open whirling unchartered waters. You want to talk about in your book the church of life and christianity life. What do you mean by that . Under the pressure of the sexual revolution was to entity has buckled and what they mean by that is theres always the desire to accommodate these radical changes in the way people live. So lets not the judge. Lets softpedal the teachings that people dont like abutts talk just about the teachings that they doop like. Some churches mainly protestant churches have completely abandoned these kinds of teachings that go all the way back to jesus. They lightened up on divorce and they have lightened up on homosexuality and they have lightened up on pretty much anything that the sexual revolution would claim as a a prerogative. The interesting thing is at the results of this has been institutional decline for the churches that ran this experiment. The Anglican Community for example comes to mind here. The Anglican Community is coalescing. I read a story recently with a headline that said though the last person to leave the anglican egg anglicanism turn off the lights . Every denomination. The church of nice was split over the church of nice and ended up going in the nice direction have not flourished as a result. So here we have a paradoxical thing. Because you would think being nice to make it more likely that people would show up in your church. Instead the opposite is true people its been learned is that strong churches, churches are strong asyi the saying goes. The more churches stick to their original foundation the more likely they are to pull people in. This doesnt mean thell Catholic Church is driving these days, far from it. You see secularization across denominations that the collapse seems to have been worse for the churches that decided to jettison the most unwanted teachings, the teachings that make our contemporaries most uncomfortable. Mary eberstadt tie that into the 1960s fda approval of the contraceptive pill on the sexual revolution. The pill becomes the biggest temptation of all time. If you were to ask people what they would on for most of without comp and it was widely embraced including by catholics and get what we saw was the churches including thehe Catholic Church shied away from traditional teachings acus they didnt want to make people uncomfortable in the post revolutionary era. So we have this dynamic where the decline of the family with the pill fuels the decline of faith and the decline of the practice of institutional organized religion. We can talk a lot more about that one if youd like. Lets look at your book, its dangerous to believe. This came out in 2016 and i believe in the bucketfeet expound on this for more than two centuries americans have prided themselves on their commitment to freedom of religion. Leaders who lean in a more secular direction might be surprised to hear that anything has happened to shake that bedrock pledge yet in recent years that historic commitment to freedom has come under siege. This is because the sexual revolution is on a collision course with traditional christianity and traditional judaism. There is no getting around it. Traditional christianity had a bedrock set of teachings that were unpopular in roman times and have been unpopular ever since. Along comes the sexual revolution and its devoted partisans which i think includes the great majority of the country at this point. Obviously the opinions were describing our minority. The question is how destructive is that bite and i think its very destructive of the United States. For example lets talk about how christian adoption agencies have been shut down in some states. Clearly the pressure coming at them and coming from people who want to replace the teachings of christianity with the anything goes sexual revolution theology. I really believe this has become a rival space to christianity. We have to ask ourselves is this good for people . Is a good for those adoptees to miss out on a loving home just because the parents that are, as have happened, is it good for the poor among whom the Little Sisters of the poor work to clobber the Little Sisters of the poor with lawsuits for contraception. Who does that help . It doesnt help the Little Sisters of the poor doesnt help their work among the poor. My point is when we see this collision and we see the attemptsol to kneecap good works done by we are seeing something that is bad for the worst among us the worst off among us and i dont think this is well understood. The people that are ideological about the sexual revolution go after christian good works routinely and this is not called out and the question of who is hurting is not called out and thats why emphasize it in the book. Like i want to ask you the Supreme Court decision on row v. Wade last year. After 50 years of legal abortion that premise ended. Should abortion in any case be legal in your view of . Im a constitutionalist and i think turned the question back to the states was an overdue constitutionalist correction. Dobbs was a very important decision. It represents the First Time Since the 1950s that there has been serious institutional rollback on the question involving the sexual revolution. Dobbs the Supreme Court says in effect a week off is wrong and we turned back to the state. I think it may be a gamechanger not only in the u. S. Elsewhere in the world because what happened after roe v. Wade his country after country watching in the United States came to adopt similar laws, came to legalize abortion where it had always been criminalized for example. Those countries i think and those leaders are now having second thoughts as well. This decision will reverberate and i would predict that it will have a good effect in the United States because if there are more babies among us that will be a humanizing thing not a bad thing. This is another issue that we should talk about. What humanizes people . It seems like a simple question. Taking care of people who are smaller and weaker or older or sicker than they are is one of the ways to be humanized and in traditional families after the interruption of the 1960s this is done routinely. Young people are taking care of old people were taking care when everyone knew what to do with the baby etc. But im not romanticizing it and im not saying we should go back to the 1950s whi

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