Barton Swaim picks out something important in his Wall Street Journal review of a book titled Moral Combat by R. Marie Griffith:

Ms. Griffith, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, writes with cold objectivity about her material, but the subject of sexual morality does not lend itself to cold objectivity. She has written a detailed history of the breakdown of American society’s broad Christian consensus on sexual behavior but says little about the consequences of this breakdown. There is nothing here about, for instance, the effects on children of single-parent upbringings, nothing about the dramatic dissolution of marriage among African-Americans, and almost nothing about the objectification of women in omnipresent pornography. The overall effect strikes this admittedly conservative reviewer as incomplete or skewed, like a book on the changing technology of warfare that never mentions death tolls or actual wars.

The narrative is all about what we’re told, and if people are only told about an evolution toward unchallenged liberty and the decline of moral institutions, but not about the trade-offs, our sense of ourselves and our history is terribly skewed.  One can see how the impression develops that our ancestors were just unenlightened, superstitious simpletons.  After all, by the progressive mainstream narrative, they allowed their freedoms to be restricted for no reason at all.

[box type=”note” style=”rounded”]To Our Readers: We need your support to challenge the progressive mainstream media narrative. Your donation helps us deliver the truth to Rhode Islanders. Please give now.[/box]

One can also see how younger generations, having been fed this narrative their whole lives, think it mere bigotry to worry about the deleterious effects of every innovation that cultural radicals force before us for approval.  Their story of history is of humanity’s perpetually being afraid to take evolutionary steps and perpetually finding that our concerns were unfounded.  At some point, having felt one’s way around in the dark and found no walls, the temptation is to increase our pace.  As Swaim notes, however, we’re ignoring sounds and signals that we might be approaching not a wall, but a cliff.

It is as if we’re watching a series of movies in which one character encourages the other to push away his inhibitions, but the movies never let the story follow up with the pair to display any consequences.  The circumstances are changed, and the hardships in every movie are just vaguely alleged to have been created by lingering inhibitions.