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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

The New Morality [1]

The New Morality [1]

Sir: With no special authority, I wish to add my quota to the discussion in your columns of the ‘New Morality’ programme. I doubt if the panel on that programme was actually unrepresentative. Though it would be stupid to suppose that one generation is less moral or more moral than another, I have often had the impression that a good many young people feel that Christian monogamy is an over-rated institution. And I feel that it is useless for any of your correspondents to argue that marriage is more or less infallibly accompanied by sexual happiness, if these young people have already noticed among their married elders a conspicuous lack of joy in life.

I do not like to see false claims being made under the heading of Christian ethics. The ethical formula of Christian marriage is not ‘Be chaste, and you will be sexually happy,’ it is rather ‘Be chaste, whether or not you are sexually happy, because God demands it.’ Though I personally accept it, I recognise this is a harsh formula. It turns on the Christian hope of eventual union with God; and there does not lie within it any implicit promise that the Christian will be given a special key to the difficult combination lock of sexual happiness. From my own observation, I would say there are just as many Christians as non-Christians who find their marriages unsatisfactory; though some of the Christians may be happier because they are less demanding and more detached.

My personal impression has been that sexual happiness is most commonly achieved in pre-marital liaisons among people who are in love; chiefly because this may be a situation where inhibition is at a minimum. With marriage itself, the deluge begins – housing trouble, in-law trouble, financial obsessions, worry about children, mutual irritability, and that curious cloud of inhibition which seems so often to accompany a settled life in the suburbs – and the adjustments which might lead to sexual happiness are pushed to the edge of the table, and sometimes fall under it, never to be recovered. Because of the degree of understandable guilt and tension involved, I doubt if extramarital liaisons ever produce much happiness for the participants; they are rather a symptom of desperation.

I do not deny that happiness is possible in modern monogamous marriage. Indeed my own experience has been more positive than negative. Yet I am daily appalled by the degree to which so many marriages become seed-beds of neurosis, stupidity, boredom and sexual anaesthesia. I am inclined to think of page 521 Christian marriage (as some have said of the Catholic Church) that its survival in spite of its glaring defects is a sign of its divine origin and continuing divine protection. Perhaps our society should bear some of the blame. I have heard that among much less affluent people, such as the Puerto Ricans, married people show a much stronger spirit of careless abandon than we ever do. They are not hag-ridden perhaps by income tax, psychology textbooks and the rigours of birth control. At any rate, I think we have to grasp the fact that quite a number of our young people have observed our practice of marriage and been repelled by it. Logically this should lead them to bold efforts to remake our singularly dreary society, and be livelier husbands and wives; but not all people are logical, and some of them dread a moribund marriage more than they dread more obvious evils.

1968 (495)