By MITCHELL KALPAKGIAN
Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child, by Anthony Esolen (Intercollegiate Studies Institute: Wilmington, DE, 2015); 222 pp. Available through www.isibooks.org.
When many hear the word compulsion, they think of a totalitarian society or a state of imprisonment or associate the word with some addiction like drugs or alcohol, but the word applies to many subtle, sophisticated, and psychological kinds of coercion that do not appear openly aggressive or threatening.
Dr. Esolen’s penetrating book exposes all these updated techniques of manipulation and indoctrination that attack and destroy a person’s humanity by suppressing his inviolable rights, exercise of freedom, religious convictions, and dictates of conscience.
This “Life Under Compulsion” assumes many shapes in contemporary America, and Esolen scrutinizes all of them with keen analysis. As the apologist of the natural, the human, the normal, and the moral, he defends with eloquence and passion the true freedom Christian culture and the wisdom of the ages bestow on man — freedom that obeys moral law and conforms to truth.
For example, he blames the public school for offering “Courses in Compulsion” rather than a liberating education. It functions like a “Teaching Machine” rather than an Alma Mater, reduces education to utilitarian ends rather than a desire for truth, and specializes in socializing children rather than expanding their minds.
The philosophy of public schools — informed by the doctrines of atheist John Dewey — assumes that information and data amount to knowledge and wisdom, trains students to identify truth exclusively as scientific knowledge and empirical evidence, and limits education to the acquisition of technical skills rather than a life of the mind. “They are educated not as persons made in the image and likeness of God but as pawns in a sociopolitical game.”
The compulsion of education depends upon its politically correct agenda of indoctrination into liberal political views that espouse “tolerance,” informational texts limited to facts rather than works of imaginative literature that expand the soul, and sex education that rejects traditional religious morality based on moral ideals such as purity. “Courses in Compulsion” turn education into ideology.
The compulsion of work also stifles the freedom of the person to grow in humanity and especially robs the home, family, and culture of the gift of womanhood relegated to the workforce. Esolen, citing Chesterton and Sigrid Undset, debunks the myth of the emancipated woman: “You are free if you push papers for a boss nine hours a day. . . . You are not free if you take the time to write enchanting letters.”
This glamorization of work also affects the young who prematurely regiment themselves into career paths based on athletics and scholarships (“the athletic-scholastic mill”) that rob them of childhood, play, and the spiritual freedom of discovering their vocation. Comparing modern childhood to the traditional childhood celebrated in John Greenleaf Whittier’s The Barefoot Boy, Esolen laments the profound loss:
“These days we have no true childhood, only a diseased precocity, introducing children to things that any decent man of Whittier’s day . . . would have considered unutterably vile.”
To prepare for the workforce, upward mobility, and wealth, the young “have to be groomed and fitted for it right now.” That means good grades, prestigious schools, generous scholarships, impressive dossiers, and a future life of many comforts and perquisites.
Like the compulsion of school that stifles the spirit, the regimentation of work also dehumanizes: It kills the essence of childhood, womanhood, and family life. The free woman does not feel the compulsion to specialize: “She could go in for everything whose beauty she loved: painting, playing the piano, singing, letter writing, and all the rest of the daily arts that make for a home. These things shed as warm an influence upon the children she raised as the sun sheds upon the world.”
Learning and working, then, need not be confining, narrowing experiences but liberating, freeing the spirit and soul for creative works of love and joy.
Another compulsion that enslaves man comes in the form of ignorance, the inability to think — the naive belief in the political process, in democracy, in elections, and in choice as a panacea to all social evils: “You are free as long as you can choose — between a manacle and a fetter, a straitjacket or a cell, an exercise bicycle or a treadmill.”
This compulsion by ignorance comes by way of the media, by commercials, by soap operas, by slogans, by verbal engineering, and by propaganda through the channels of education: “The agents of mass stultification have done their work” as seen in a society that calls the unborn in the womb “a developing child” if the woman desires to bear the baby or “a parasitic blob” because she does not want the child: “You must believe that what is obviously human is not human, and what is obviously alive is not alive.”
This failure to think assumes another common form — a life always in a state of crisis or emergency that demands swift decisions by government without full deliberation of consequences. Esolen aptly identifies this trend as “the politics of compulsion, which depends upon a continually instigated sense of urgency.” Political statements that amount to exaggeration, great promises based on “change,” exploit the ignorant who assent to lies rather than think.
Freedom As License
The sexual revolution has inflicted another compulsion in the form of unbridled lust abetted by “the prurience of magazines, library books, advertising campaigns, politicians, videogames” that Esolen describes as “the law of the itch,” a perpetual scratching that demands incessant titillation.
The compulsion of lust presupposes the onus of chastity and imagines freedom as sexual license, never discovering the relationship between illicit pleasures and a darkened intellect as, in Shakespeare’s phrase, “reason panders will”: the mind rationalizes, justifies, and excuses the sins of lust rather than controls the urges and appetites.
In their compulsion the debauched never confront the enslavement to the flesh that lust produces or have any awareness of the liberation of chastity: “Where chastity is not honored, people lose their reverence for the sexes, and with that reverence they lose the dimension of depth in their sexual encounters. These tend to be loveless and joyless, disappointing, and perfunctory” compared to the spousal bond of husband and wife who consummate their love as “creative, holy, blessed by God.”
The popular morality of political correctness has introduced the type Esolen calls the New Pharisee, one who rejects biblical teaching and reinvents morality to be more suitable for a modern age. Whereas Christianity teaches man to tolerate much (carry his cross with patience), forgive seventy times seven, and condone no evil (never calling evil good), the life ruled by compulsion invents its own commandments: “We are to condone much, tolerate little, and forgive nothing.”
Condoning much means accepting every type of living arrangement as the equivalent of marriage and never judging; tolerating little means punishing opposing views as “hate speech”; and forgiving nothing means revenge for not conforming to the “new and improved moral law” with its many commandments:
“Thou shalt not speak ill of any culture, with the following exceptions: American, British, medieval, Christian, and Catholic”; “Thou shalt not say what you believe unless it is approved by the pundits on television”; “Thou shalt attend these sex education classes”; “Thou shalt not say that men are for women and women are for men”; “Thou shalt not say disparaging things about global warming”; “Thou shalt be feminist in thought, word, and deed.”
As Esolen vividly illustrates, modern America verges closer to the Orwellian universe depicted in 1984 — a totalitarian society where real human freedom does not exist, where people agree to madness like two plus two equals five by compulsion, where the power of the state exploits man’s weakness, fear, and self-interest, where all persons merge into “mass man” or an anonymous mob that amounts to “a congregation of compulsions.”
Explaining that “the libido dominandi [the desire of ruling] makes common cause with the dominium libidinis [the enslavement of lust],” Esolen clarifies the psychology that underlies the life under compulsion: Rulers pander to base human desires to maintain control. Self-interest tempts man to survive by passive assent: “He gives in, he goes along.” His new promise of salvation depends on “belonging to the right mob.”
For all its cant about rights, choice, and liberation, a life of compulsion in all of these forms offers nothing but a mess of pottage. It offers no vision of man that conceives of the freedom of the soul that contemplates truth and beauty, hungers for truth and peace, or yearns for the union of love or the Beatific Vision.
It reduces man to a creature of the state with “no culture, no real home, no transcendent object of devotion, no aim but what is given to him in mass education, mass entertainment, and mass politics.”
Like an ancient prophet with luminous insight, Dr. Esolen warns of the nightmare of a modernized hell that makes man “the slave of slaves.”
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(Dr. Kalpakgian is a professor emeritus of humanities.)
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