I begin with a confession: I never had sex with any of my high school or junior high school teachers. Of course, my classmates and I talked about sex; and all of us claimed to have had a multitude of experiences. But sex with one of our teachers? I can say with the utmost confidence that such a thought never ever crossed our minds. It is not that we couldn’t recognize that so-and-so was “hot”. It is just that teachers were people we looked up to and respected. By the same token, we never ever supposed that a teacher would hit on one of us. That thought never even made it to the level of a bad joke ! ! ! And that, too, was a respect thing.
But welcome to the present. I understand that times have changed. I certainly understand that we are more open about sex in many, many ways. And I might even think that there are respects in which this is a good thing. It is a good thing, for instance, that women are more appreciative of themselves as sexual beings than they were in the past. This progress notwithstanding, I am hoping that no one thinks that it is a good thing for teachers in junior or senior high school to be seducing their students.
The obvioius question, of course, is this: What has happened in society that has resulted in increasing numbers of junior and senior high school teachers pursuing sexual liaisons with their students? Part of what animates the question is the age difference, and the concomitant difference in maturity. Pamela Turner, for instance, is a 27-year old woman who had sex with a 13-year old student. Debra Lafave is a 23-year old who had sex with a 14-year old. The qualitative difference in maturity here ought to be so stark—and on a number of levels—as to make the very idea of a sexual liaison seem incongruous.
Now, let me draw attention to something that is, at once, most illuminating and very frightening. If anything is clear, it that with regard to racial diversity people have learnt to be uncompromising in their political correctness in their public remarks and behavior. Why, I can’t even get a student—certainly not a white student—to say the word “nigger,” though she or he is reading the word from a passage in, say, Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mocking Bird. Students from abroad here at Syracuse University who cannot always make themselves understood in English nonetheless say “African-American”.
So what this tells me quite unambiguously is that public standards can make an absolutely formidable difference with regard to how people actually behave. Because society does not tolerate the word “nigger”, even when one is reading the word from a passage in a book, then it is the rare white person who will actually utter the word. Although there are no legal penalties that attach to anyone uttering the word “nigger”, the depth of social opprobrium for one who does so has no bounds.
So I find it wildly incongruous that we live in a society that pretty much assures that no white person will utter the word “nigger,” even when reading the word from a literary masterpiece, but somehow manages to allow junior or high school teachers to have sex with their students. Yet, there is no question as to which form of behavior is more harmful.
If political correctness is any indication, then I just have to assume that if society were as adamantly opposed to junior and high school teachers having liaisons with their students as it is to saying the word “nigger”, then such behavior on the part of teachers simply would not exist. End of story.
So to my earlier question, “How did it come to pass that teachers are now hitting on their junior and high school students?”, the answer is mind-boggling in its simplicity: Society has lowered its standards of moral excellence with respect to sexual behavior. And, along the way, we have made the mistake of jettisioning the idea of shame.
We have moved mistakenly from the correct view that sex is a good thing to the incorrect view that, therefore, any bounds with regard to sexual behavior are inappropriate. Nothing could be further from the truth.
For one thing, from the fact that people are capable of sex physically, what most certainly does not follow is that they are capable of handling it emotionally. And it most certainly is a mistake to divorce sex from its emotional component.
When social standards are operating as they should, then they serve as a small but deeply important reminder of the truths of the preceding paragraph. Some people do not need such a reminder. There is always the saint or the hero in society. But most of us will never rise to that level of excellence. I probably will not, though (if you will permit me) it is probably true that in terms of character I am stronger than most.
As both John Stuart Mill and Sigmund Freud saw, when the proper social standards are in place they serve as a reminder of the kind of excellences that our lives should display and also as a kind of damn that prevents the inappropriate overflow that the typical person might experience. Thus, social standards are rather like a gift that the members of society give to themselves—a moral savings account, if you will, that yields enormous dividends. In this regard, shame plays a vital role.
Life being what it is, we are all exposed to temptations of various sorts. Sometimes the exercise of foresight enables us to deflect the temptation. But there are moments when, unexpectedly, temptation seems to envelop us. This is when social standards of excellence can provide us with a measure of fortitude that we would not otherwise have. Many a person has, in some instance or the other, resisted temptation because she or he wanted to avoid the shame that yielding to it would occasion.
The present schizophrenia of society is most revealing. On the one hand, we worry endlessly for the safety and well-being of our children. On the other, we have destroyed, and continue to destroy, the social standards that underwrite the very well-being that we wish for our children. We have done so in the name of liberty.
Alas, it is only among the gods that unfettered liberty would not have any untoward moral consequences. We mortals are a very long way from being gods. Thus, it is mere naivety on our part to think that we do not need symbols of moral excellence around us. Liberty without shame is an absolutely deadly combination.
It has become fashionable to eschew religious institutions, as if they are places for the psychologically warped. Not so. These institutions have served, as George Will noted in Statecraft as Soulcraft, as the husbandry of moral virtue in society. And their demise has created an enormous moral vacuum in our society—a vacuum that is being filled with behavior that is excruciatingly and manifestly inappropriate.
If this analysis is correct, then as long as we go on maintaining that social standards of moral excellence are not necessary, because after all liberty is the ultimate good, then not only will our children continue to be unsafe, but society itself will invariably become so much the worse for it. Or so it is given the basic assumption that our children are our future.
We are living under the delusion that the law can or should cover all behavior that is appropriate and inappropriate between individuals. The unvarnished truth, however, is that the law cannot do that, nor was it ever intended to do that.
The inappropriate sexual behavior towards their students on the part of the Pamela Turners, the Debra Lafaves, and the like is simply a case of reaping what we have sown. The law is not and cannot be a substitute for a commitment to moral excellence in our hearts and souls. This is an axiom of human behavior. And as long as we remain oblivious to this, thinking that somehow we can get around the truth of this axiom of human behavior, then the moral reality is that we can expect to see more, rather less, despicable behavior of the type exhibited by the individuals named above.
Standards of moral excellence, and nothing else, stand in the way of a most undesirable reality: “Hot Sex in the Schools: Get It Now”.
The choice is to embrace excellence or to be devoured by vice. To convince ourselves otherwise is, quite literally, to be too clever for our own good.
