You have read me telling in this space about the phone conversation I had with my sister in 1999, two weeks before the birth of my first child. Ruthie had two kids by then, so she knew what she was talking about. She told me that all the fears my then-wife and I had about losing freedoms were justified: you will lose these freedoms. But what nobody can tell you in advance is what you will gain in the bargain. It is very hard to make a case for the joy of being bound to a child to people who have never experienced it. Just trust me, she said: y’all won’t even miss what you’re about to give up, because the joy of being a mom and dad will more than compensate.

Of course she was right about that. I’ve thought a lot since then about what Rob Henderson, in his latest Substack newsletter (not sure if it’s paywalled), calls “the paradox of liberation.” Namely, it’s the strange experience of feeling more free by surrendering certain freedoms. You foreclose your options so you can go deeper into commitment to the ones you have chosen, or that you have accepted as your duty.

The ultimate goal of liberalism is to set the choosing individual free from any unchosen constraints. The Sexual Revolution was the application of liberalism to erotic life. The other day, the Free Press sponsored a public debate on the question of has the Sexual Revolution failed? Rob Henderson writes:

At the outset, before the debate Bari Weiss asked the attendees to vote “yes” or “no” on their phones. Forty-four percent of the audience voted “no,” indicating that they believed the sexual revolution failed; 56% voted “yes” indicating they believed the revolution succeeded.

At the end of the event, after the debaters presented their arguments, the results went in the opposite direction, with “no” (the sexual revolution did not fail) eking out a victory.

Personally, I voted “no” both times.

The sexual revolution obviously succeeded in its aim: more freedom.

The answer to the debate description (“The sexual revolution promised liberation. Fifty years on, we ask: has it delivered?”) is obviously yes.

But the reason why a debate makes sense is because many people conflate liberation (freedom) with happiness.

The revolution has unquestionably increased freedom. But it also made people less happy. Many people, though, anticipated that greater freedom would necessarily bring greater happiness.

Sadly the world doesn’t work that way.

We can’t have everything good all at once. We can have some good things, but we can’t have all good things at the same time.

You can be maximally free, or you can be maximally happy, but you can’t be both.

Henderson says that women are unquestionably freer post-SexRev than before, in terms of exercising personal agency in their sex lives. But research shows that overall, they are less happy. So too are men, overall, though now they are happier than women.

More Henderson:

So what’s more important, happiness for children, or freedom for adults? Our society has decided, and there’s no going back.

At the debate, there was a lot of attention devoted to discussing the impact of the sexual revolution on men and women—whether the revolution failed women, or failed men, or helped men more than women, or helped women more than men. Nobody asked whether the sexual revolution failed children. People already know the answer.

The sexual revolution gave rise to new laws and cultural norms that made divorce and remarriage easier. This was not without cost.

The closest anyone came to discussion how children’s lives have changed in the wake of the revolution was Anna Khachiyan, who mentioned the Cinderella Effect.

Children living with one genetic parent and one stepparent are approximately 40 times more likely to be abused than children living with both genetic parents. This greater rate occurs even when controlling for poverty and socioeconomic status.

Henderson didn’t mention this, but the Sexual Revolution has also resulted in a collapse in childbearing that is almost entirely global now. It turns out that when people believe that having children is a choice, as opposed to just something that people do, they will have fewer children — so many fewer children as to put the survival of entire societies at risk. If you think about it, it’s crazy: in the West, at least, there has never been a time when it was materially easier to raise children. But there has been mass turning away from making families. Why?

I was talking not long ago to a young couple who married recently, and asked them about having kids. Putting the question to them made me wonder how I would answer it if I were young. Assuming I held my Christian beliefs, I would say yes, but it would be a significantly more reluctant yes than it was in the years 1999-2006, when we had my three kids. Now, it’s not material want that concerns me. It’s raising them in a society that has lost its mind in serious and damaging ways.

Still, I live in a city now — Budapest — that was devastated by the Second World War, and where people suffered immensely from privation during the forty years of Soviet occupation. Yet they had children, still. Now, though, they don’t, not like they used to, and neither does any other country in the West. First we chose Freedom For Adults over Happiness For Children, and now we’re choosing Freedom For Adults over children at all.

The Hungarian government is led by conservatives who are trying to do some things to get the birth rate back up. Hungarian PM Viktor Orban and his party have seen quite clearly that the ideology that rules the modern West leads to civilizational collapse. And yet, whenever the Hungarians try to do anything slightly different from what the European elites think is right and proper, they find themselves trashed as fascists. Put another way, they are trying to make a country in which it is easier for children to thrive. Many ruling class Europeans despise them for it.

I agree with Rob Henderson: this civilization has made its choice, and there is no going back. We’re going to have to ride this thing out till the collapse. I remind you once again of what Philip Rieff saw in the 1960s, at the start of the Sexual Revolution. Rieff, an agnostic Jew, recognized that what we now call the Sexual Revolution was a sign of the death knell of Christianity as the controlling narrative of the West. Why? Because, said Rieff, refusing sexual individualism was at the core of Christianity’s social teaching. This is what set it apart as a social phenomenon from the Roman culture into which it irrupted. Give that up, said Rieff, and you’ve surrendered.

Now we are repaganizing, in the sense of going back to pre-Christian sexual norms and practices. Secular humanist types who think we can have humane, rational, and happiness-giving sexual practices absent Christianity will learn otherwise. I read something today saying that the sale of sex dolls, for both men and women, is booming. Why? According to one manufacturer, people today like the “control” and safety having sex with a non-responsive blog of silicon gives them. This is freedom? This is happiness?