The Repeal of Reticence
By Rochelle Gurstein
Hill & Wang, 355 pp., $27.50

Larry Flynt and Robert Mapplethorpe may represent merely the most recent stop along the path our culture has traveled for well over a century. Though it is difficult to imagine, there may be worse yet to come. But then only a few years back it was impossible to imagine the public display of Hustler or Mapplethorpe's photographs of homosexual sadomasochism. The history of our decline, and the reasons for it, is elegantly traced and analyzed by Rochelle Gurstein, a disciple of the late Christopher Lasch, in The Repeal of Reticence.

All cultures--until, possibly, this one--have acknowledged the need for privacy, if only for the most private bodily functions. A sense of shame has kept these aspects of life out of the public arena and thus lent a degree of dignity and decorum not only to the individual but to the public arena, the area of our common life together. Gurstein quotes Hannah Arendt: "The activity of taste decides how this world … is to look and sound, what men will see and what they will hear in it." But Gurstein concludes that "the public sphere has degenerated into a stage for sensational displays of matters that people formerly would have considered unfit for public appearance."

How did we come to this? Gurstein puts it down to the history of the struggle between what she calls the "party of reticence" and the "party of exposure." The party of reticence holds that some aspects of life--and not merely its inevitable biological functions--should be hidden from the public gaze: sex, for example. The party of reticence believes that sex is a great joyous mystery and that to expose it to the public gaze, to discuss it as a mere biological function, is to deprive it of its quasi-sacred quality.

That, of course, is precisely what the modern flood of pornography does: It reduces sex to physiology. If sex is simply a physical act, without significance beyond the act itself, there are no limits to what may be portrayed, making the search for new sensations never-ending. A movement so constituted is necessarily hostile to any form of reticence, bringing it under violent rhetorical attack. Gurstein sums up the movement: While the party of exposure discredited the reticent sensibility by recasting its values of tact, discretion, good taste, and politeness as signs of guilty cover-up or "elitism," and mercilessly caricatured its respect for modesty and shame as prurient prudery, in the end, it would be the legal profession that would acquire the final authority to resolve disputes about which things may appear in public.

Even before the legal profession assumed jurisdiction over the subject, the party of reticence was on the defensive, subject to rhetorical abuse, and unable convincingly to articulate the case either for personal privacy or a decent, even decorous, public life. The conventions it defended as repositories of the considered results of experience were derided as the taboos of a puritanical bourgeoisie.

The legal profession has assumed the role of cultural arbiter in our society, so it is not surprising that it should undertake to govern here as well. That profession, including the judiciary, is drawn from, and responds to, what we call, for lack of a better term, our cultural elite, and it is precisely that elite that provides the intellectual core of the party of exposure. For that reason, the result of the struggles in the courts was foreordained.

Law proved, whether inevitably or not, incapable of addressing the real grounds for concern about public obscenity. Law is suited to a discourse of wrongdoers and victims, but it lacks the vocabulary to analyze the more amorphous, and yet more important, subject of our common life: the limits to be set on the prevalence of public displays of violence, vulgarity, and even outright obscenity. The law's approach, its terms of discourse, have set the terms of the wider public debate, with disastrous consequences. The original argument about obscenity and pornography has devolved into one about keeping sexually explicit materials, whether on the Internet or in rap lyrics, away from children, the presumed victims. Not only will that prove, at best, only partially effective and, at worst, impossible, but it fails utterly to address the kind of world the rest of us must live in. Gurstein writes:

As the levels of public violence, lewdness, and indecency required to incite shock rose ever higher the insight of the party of reticence was once again affirmed: repeated exposure to indecency ultimately inures people and threatens to make all of society shameless, in the precise sense that it considers nothing sacred.

We have seen that happen in our lifetimes as standards of public behavior have drastically declined. Though that decline is usually attributed to the cultural rebellions of the 1960s, as one reads the arguments that Gurstein cites from a century ago, one can feel the sixties coming on. At least by the turn of the century, the party of exposure had gained the upper hand. She demonstrates that the advance took place in the name of sex education, realist fiction, and invasive journalism. The theory as to the first was that, sex being natural and wholesome, we would all live happier and emotionally healthier lives if the secrecy surrounding sex were removed.

The upshot is a society so healthy that we have grade-school children learning to fit condoms on cucumbers, people appearing on daytime television to share their most intimate lives, usually of a sexual nature, with a nationwide audience, and best-selling novels about pedophilia and incest.

The core of the party of exposure may have been the intellectuals but so complete was their victory that their attitudes suffuse the entire society. How else to account for the profitability of Hustler or for the refusal of juries to convict Robert Mapplethorpe, or those who show his photographs in museums, of obscenity? How else to account for the soft pornography of television and the hard pornography of popular music and motion pictures? How else to explain museum exhibits featuring vomit and excrement, exhibits to which the now enlightened bourgeoisie flock?

The party of exposure appears originally to have had an idealistic view of human nature: Let all be told, let all be shown, and we will be a society of well-balanced individuals. Smut and obscenity, they argued, thrive where there is secrecy--in a word, privacy. The party of exposure reckoned without the "avant garde," which seeks always the new and shocking. Astound the bourgeoisie was a stupid remark when it was first uttered; now it is both stupid and impossible. The bourgeoisie seeks sensation as avidly as the avant garde. The party of exposure also reckoned without the element of depravity in human nature generally, which brought ever more degrees of violence and pornographic sex to the mass market. The party of exposure has resulted in a culture its founders had no intention of creating.

Whether or not Gurstein would appreciate the comparison, her party of exposure and party of reticence may translate into what we know today as the parties of cultural liberalism and cultural conservatism. These, in turn, may be seen as manifestations of two dominant, but quite different, views of human nature. That difference has created our culture wars, which pit, to put it bluntly, carriers of antinomianism against believers in original sin.

The Repeal of Reticence is an invaluable exploration of this struggle. The degree of erudition is dazzling: Gurstein appears to have read everything relevant to her subject back into the last century, and she shares it with her readers in generous portions. While grateful for the documentation, the reader, at moments, feels a hunger for a few sweeping, even unsubstantiated, generalizations.

In common with almost all other books detailing the degradation of our culture, Gurstein's has nothing to say about what should or can be done to reverse the trend or, at least, to stabilize matters where they stand now. It is conceivable, though just barely, that books such as this will persuade the party of exposure that their view of human nature is seriously deficient, leading that party to support a restoration of old values and constraints. Or it is conceivable that we require something that has a long and beneficial history in our culture but is now regarded with general disapproval: censorship. Yet the rot of moral relativism, which is inseparable from the party of exposure, has probably spread so far that the necessary votes are no longer available for that remedy.

It is not required, however, that Gurstein offer a solution that nobody else has. There may not be one. She has written one of the most learned, persuasive, and readable books I know of concerning our present dilemma and its historical roots.

Robert H. Bork is the John M. Olin Distinguished Scholar in Constitutional and Legal Studies at AEI.