REFUSING CONSENT
PLATTNER, DAVID
REFUSING CONSENT Robert Knight Criticizes the Age By David Plattner It is with more than a touch of sarcasm that Robert H. Knight entitles his new critique of relativism The Age of Consent. This...
...The key villain is materialism, which he takes as encompassing both sensualism and the love of physical things...
...They have abandoned their former values and welcomed relativism with open arms, eager to indulge a newly liberated sensual appetite...
...Now the word implies “heavy-handed liberalism, officially sanctioned sexual deviancies, group privileges, big government, and hostility toward Judaism and Christianity...
...This is Knight’s preferred moniker for the present era, a time in which phony tolerance has become a governing principle...
...Knight is on firm ground when attacking the degradation of popular culture, though he sometimes seems unduly willing to blame previous thinkers for originating the modern degradation he decries...
...The Age of Consent is equally scalding about movies and popular music...
...He suspects that a backlash has set in among millions of citizens...
...But in other ways, Knight has followed a well-worn track, and his book reflects the frustration of many conservatives— especially religious ones—over the corruption of American culture...
...It is thus the sexual revolution—linked, as a form of materialism, with the avariciousness and commodification more traditionally understood as materialism—that has been a persistent and horrific enemy of Judeo- Christian morality, chipping away at the American soul...
...Knight laments a small-screen wasteland of “young adults consumed with casual sex, money, drugs, and autonomous lifestyles...
...He brands Socrates, for example, an egomaniac, asserting that the philosopher’s “seemingly selfless act” in accepting the Athenians’ sentence of death was “ultimately narcissistic...
...Missing entirely is a sense of generational continuity, community ties, religion, and family...
...All of these influences have conspired to entice average, decent Americans into scorning the idea of objective truth and turning their backs on religion...
...In many ways, The Age of Consent is a unique analysis of all that’s gone A student at Yale University, David Plattner was a 1998 summer intern at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...As for rock ’n’ roll, it appeals perpetually to the weaker, lustful side of the human being, encouraging deplorable behavior...
...He goes on to dissect relativism and materialism—the first “the siren song of decadence” and the second “the religion that fails...
...The bad effects of pop-culture build and build, as “a constant diet of sleaze makes one more accepting of sleaze, either on one’s own part or when it is embraced by others...
...Beginning with a chapter called “The Way We Were,” in which he remembers a better past and inveighs against a host of current ills, Knight seeks examples of decay in such places as our decline in civility and the increasing vulnerability of the Amish...
...Relativism, he writes, is “being exposed as a malevolence that wears a mask of benign tolerance...
...Knight’s final sentence expresses the hope that “the Age of Consent” will give way to “an Age of Faith...
...wrong in late modern times, filled with the author’s wide-ranging examples of outrageousness...
...All of these require deferred gratification, which does not lend itself to sensational television...
...Knight explains that tolerance, “like any other good thing,” was “originally a virtue...
...And perhaps those who haven’t yet grasped the weaknesses of a faithless time will be induced to think twice about an age of boundless consent...
...Knight accomplishes what he sets out to do...
...More important, it is contributing to a revival of religion: “Unquenched by the numbing pursuit of material and physical comfort and nonstop amusement, the soul is crying out for real sustenance, the kind that only God can fill because He happened to make us that way...
...Francis Bacon, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and a range of other Western thinkers similarly come in for harsh judgments in The Age of Consent— sometimes unfairly, as when Knight ascribes the famous line about unhappy families that begins Anna Karenina to Dostoyevsky rather than Tolstoy...
...Devoting four chapters to TV, he bemoans the immorality of such shows as Melrose Place, NYPD Blue, and Married . . . with Children, which glorify homosexuality, adultery, bad parenting, and the disobedience of children...
...As Knight sees it, religion and the family have spent the last three decades under siege from powerful, malignant forces...
...For all of his anguish, however, Knight closes with a sense of optimism...
...Despite such missteps, The Age of Consent is a persuasive—even an occasionally witty—volume...
...Knight blames Hollywood for establishing a decadent agenda in its films and shoving it down the throats of a susceptible public...
...Knight’s analysis is on the mark, but he himself hints at the problem: It’s no easy thing to generate viewers for wholesome and life-affirming shows among a population habituated to sex, drugs, and violence...
...Knight faults Socrates for denying the “individual’s capacity”—which “wittingly or unwittingly gave aid and comfort to totalitarians of all stripes...
...Knight is very much at home when examining television, the film industry, and popular music—his three great poisoners...
...Readers predisposed to his view, of course, will find their position amply confirmed...
Vol. 4 • September 1998 • No. 3
