Books, Arts & Manners

Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility, by Germaine Greer (Harper & Row, 539 pp., $19.95)

I once read about a primitive tribe that killed all its own infants and repopulated itself by kidnapping children from other tribes. This has always struck me as a good model of our educated elite of “progressives” who contraceive and abort and recruit new members of their class through the school system, where, as the late Alvin Gouldner observed (with approval), the young are weaned from the teachings of home and church and inducted into the New Class. The more successful of the new members write dutiful autobiographies celebrating their “personal growth” via “consciousness-raising” and denigrate their cultural past: The South becomes a hotbed of racism, the middle-class family is recalled as a den of repression, Holy Mother Church is portrayed as Mommie Dearest. Borrowing the progressive rhetoric, we might say that these memoirists have internalized the values of their oppressors.

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility, by Germaine Greer (Harper & Row, 539 pp., $19.95)

I once read about a primitive tribe that killed all its own infants and repopulated itself by kidnapping children from other tribes. This has always struck me as a good model of our educated elite of “progressives” who contraceive and abort and recruit new members of their class through the school system, where, as the late Alvin Gouldner observed (with approval), the young are weaned from the teachings of home and church and inducted into the New Class. The more successful of the new members write dutiful autobiographies celebrating their “personal growth” via “consciousness-raising” and denigrate their cultural past: The South becomes a hotbed of racism, the middle-class family is recalled as a den of repression, Holy Mother Church is portrayed as Mommie Dearest. Borrowing the progressive rhetoric, we might say that these memoirists have internalized the values of their oppressors.