My reaction to some of the blogging of Sarah Hoyt is probably colored by the route by which I typically find it.

I wouldn’t claim to know what she claims her politics to be, but I usually come to it through the libertarian wing of the blogosphere, mainly Glenn Reynolds.  Rightly or wrongly, I therefore attribute to her the political philosophy one finds in those quarters.

For that reason, it’s interesting to read her lamenting that parochial news from her native Portugal shows a turn of her community toward “low class”:

It just seems that every woman my age has been divorced three times, or is shacked up with some guy half her age who is eating out her savings. Every younger woman is having kids out of wedlock starting well before seventeen.

By contrast, she hearkens back to a time that was at least ordered, at least looking forward and upward (whatever sort of “upward” you want to infer), even if it was permeated with the sort of hypocrisy that a society cannot avoid if its imperfect human members are striving to be better.  She runs through too many excellent details for me to pick among them, but she bookends them with two important statements:

… I’m not going to lie and say that all things that went on and the established mode was the best one. It very well wasn’t. For one, it was a genuinely patriarchal society in the sense that women had almost no power. …

It wasn’t ideal. It wasn’t in any circumstances ideal. But it was “decent.”

Between her pointer finger and her thumb, Hoyt may have caught the defining error of modernity.  Namely, we’ve tended to miss a plain, obvious fact: There’s a great distance between recognizing that the past was not ideal (and neither is the present) and concluding that we must repair the problems with reckless urgency — by any means necessary, as the lefty slogan goes.  We tend to scoff at the notion of “decency,” without making any attempt to define what used to be meant by it and to determine whether there were very good reasons to maintain it.  Hoyt names one:

You had to be really far gone/aggressive/scary to be left on your own.

(By the way, that’s “left on your own” in the sense of being left without help or hope, not in the sense of having privacy.)

What’s striking about coming across this sentiment in the libertarian neighborhoods of the Internet is that the folks one typically finds there exude the aesthetic of the post-’60s culture.  Some of them, though, are too smart not to have caught on to the importance of the foundation that the children of the ’60s have been striving to bash away.  Glenn Reynolds, for example, seems to me to have been highlighting posts such as Hoyt’s more often than he once did.  More often than once, he’s made the suggestion that progressives are knocking down walls and expecting the roof to stay up. (One example.)

The casual support for causes like same-sex marriage remains in place, however. (I raise the issue, here, simply as a high-profile example.)

Look, it wasn’t that long ago that the situation for the folks now entering into such arrangements was much worse than “ideal.”  That doesn’t mean that our society should  suppress the recognition that intimate male-female relationships are fundamentally unique in a way that imposes unique responsibilities.  It doesn’t mean that we can afford to remove the institution by which society once sought to support those responsibilities.

The history and literature of our culture is littered with markers along the path by which modernity lost its sense of balance between moving forward and staying on firm ground.  One that comes to my mind often is from the conclusion to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter.  Hester Prynne, you may recall, became the target of a non-ideal, “genuinely patriarchal society” when she gave birth to a child not her husband’s.  After the drama of her story had run its course, women (and some men) would seek her out for counsel concerning their own failings:

She assured them, too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. Earlier in life, Hester had vainly imagined that she herself might be the destined prophetess, but had long since recognized the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow. The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful; and wise, moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy; and showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end!

At the end of the day, that’s what it’s about, isn’t it — Sarah Hoyt’s sense of the decency of middle class culture?  It’s the gradual (sometimes achingly slow) advance toward and maximization of happiness.  It requires a maturity and a community’s commitment toward fostering maturity.

That simple truth has been plainly accessible at least since Mr. Hawthorne’s time.  One can’t help but wonder who (or what) would make such a deliberate, disastrous project of pushing our community toward some other end.