In that neglected gem the University Bookman, the fascinating critic Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry has provided quite the astute summary and elaboration of the core insights of James Poulos’s series of descriptions of our “pink police state.” Our friend James has brought together what are, at this point, the enduring themes of postmodern conservatism, including his spin on Tocqueville’s better-and-worse theorizing. Things have, from a certain view, gotten better on the liberty front; everyone is a kind of selective libertarian now. From another view, things are also getting better insofar as people are becoming more prudent when it comes to personal health. We know where more and more risk factors are, and we do what we can to avoid them. But there’s a cost to liberty in our devotion to health and safety or personal sustainability. We are, as I’ve said for a decade or more, getting more puritanical, prohibitionist, and paranoid when it comes to avoiding risk. As Gobry observes, our selective libertarianism is a long distance from libertinism:

In Nietzschean terms, the libertine’s attitude towards sex is a thoroughly Dionysian embrace of sex as an untamable elemental force (with the added frisson of rebellion against the God of the Bible); the pink police state’s is an Apollonic domestication as harmless entertainment. Do whatever you want, so long as the risk is contained. Bro-choice is pro-choice.

Safe sex is bourgeois sex. It’s even nihilistic sex, in a certain sense. But it’s characteristic of the kind of nihilists who lack courage–tamed nihilists. It allows you to be master of your domain without really being master of your domain. Techno-calculation replaces virtue, yada yada. Still, it’s the case that acting on the basis of any calculation about one’s own benefit and that of others does produce self-restraint based on self-denial. Let’s not be so Nietzschean as to be against domestication as such. Let’s not be accused of endorsing some culture of rape. But true domestication, you can respond, is genuinely relational or with shared personal responsibilities in mind. The real problem is that “safe sex” points in the direction of the pure sentimentality of pornography or imagining a meaningful relationship with an Operating System programmed with your safety and self-esteem in mind (see the film Her). When Tocqueville talked up relatively unerotic or bourgeois or middle-class sex, it was as safely confined to the marital bedroom and with the procreation and raising of children in mind. Let’s admit that it’s more better than worse than aristocratic sex, with its double standards, detachment of love from marriage, yada yada. Two cheers for old-fashioned bourgeois sex and the nuclear family, with their affirmation of the practical benefits of the Christian virtues of chastity and fidelity and their reconciliation of productivity and love.

Today the erotic bourgeois virtue has, it’s true, tended to become only do what you want as long as it’s securely detached from birth and death, from the hell of a necessarily enduring connection with other people. It’s also do what you want as long as you’re being productive too. It’s too risky not to have your own money. So our “Apollonic domestication” is being what David Brooks called a “bourgeois bohemian.” It’s living freely in the sense of being unmoved, at least deeply, by love. It’s the flat-souled life of American educated sophisticates described by Allan Bloom more than a quarter century ago. It’s a world of single moms and superfluous men. Well, it’s not exactly what Bloom described, because he didn’t understand Americans to be moved deeply by death either, by the prospect of one’s own extinction. They turn out to be moved enough by the experience of personal contingency to be pretty obsessed by risk containment.

It’s because we don’t have what it takes to be authentic libertines, to have dangerous liaisons, that we don’t have what it takes to be genuine libertarians. Increasingly, however, our young self-described libertarians are imagining themselves to be libertines, living in a world so unrepressed that liaisons or hook-ups don’t have to be dangerous or even dissed any more.

True libertarians claim to have virtue enough to fend for themselves. Selective libertarians are fine with the state providing a very safe space for their harmless self-indulgences or expressions of personal identity. That might mean that true libertarians affirm a somewhat repressive world in which characters are actually developed with virtue in mind. A free man, Nietzsche says, is a warrior. We don’t have to go that far. But we might say a free man is a gentleman, someone who knows who he is and what he’s supposed to do, someone who characterized by the virtue of self-command. The true libertarian is Marcus Aurelius or Atticus Finch.

Overall, it’s my judgment that not only is this criticism of the relationship between the evolution of bourgeois bohemianism and statism getting to be old news, but it’s always been more than a bit exaggerated. Sophisticated Americans, after all, are getting and staying married in bigger numbers. They’re deferring romantic gratification not mainly out of fear of losing their minds in love, but because they’re centering their lives around both work and children. They just don’t have much time to fool around or even be fulfilling themselves online, because their loving relational responsibilities are genuinely demanding. Unlike aristocrats, both husband and wife now have to be productive, and they’re stuck in small houses with the kids without “help” when it comes to the diapers and other chores. Two cheers for the resurgent bourgeois family!

Still, parents are fairly paranoid about their kids’ health and safety, as well as their prospects for personal productivity. Notice I said only fairly paranoid, maybe paranoid by comparison to their parents and especially grandparents. They aren’t so security conscious that they can’t be in love with their kids in the present.

Still, I agree that the main threat to the future of human liberty in any techno-bourgeois society will probably be preferring personal security over liberty. The merging of perfect security with perfect liberty, some say (such the man of the hour Peter Thiel), will be with the coming of the Singularity. But the Americans who still “invest” in children are mostly too sensible to really hope that they and their kids will soon be conscious software or machines or whatever.

The childless future Thiel imagines will be a world of “intelligent design” (see his new book) or perfect rational control. Is a world without chance or contingency really free? Well, it does depend upon the real power of human agency, but it’s also one where, seemingly, nothing about the future is indefinite. A deathless world is also probably one without love, at least if it’s our own techno-creation.

And there’s still a lot to the observation that Americans are increasingly tempted by libertarian post-political fantasies, precisely because they don’t associate “being free” with the responsible and devoted exercise of political liberty. That means they don’t resist nearly enough security-conscious big government or endlessly intrusive big Google.

Notice that, following the general spirit of Poulos (and Bloom and Brooks), I confined my analysis to prosperous and sophisticated Americans, while neglecting the proletarianization of the middle class and all that.

The argument for that kind of selective analysis, as I’ve explained before, is becoming increasingly untenable.