High society

In the 1960s, Malcolm Muggeridge remarked that “sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.” In the heady days of the sexual revolution, his observation had a special force: it revealed, behind the relaxed, permissive posture of “free love” advocates, a concealed cultic reverence for the bodily pleasures that they elevated above all others. For their sake, social mores and immemorial prohibitions needed to be set aside, and formerly shameful practices, such as infidelity and promiscuity, were to be brazenly embraced. The opponents of the widespread collapse of sexual morality were, for their part, cast as out-of-touch prudes. And so, encouraged by the theories of radical progressives and the countercultural forces of music and the arts, a generation-long social experiment ensued. Facilitated by easy access to contraception and abortion, sex became untethered from both permanent companionate unions and the life-long project of childrearing that had formerly followed thereafter.

But the so-called “liberation” that this generation achieved was anything but liberating. The rejection of traditional values and the release of libidinal energies have, ironically enough, created only a blasted sexless wasteland from which both sexes now flee; solitary anxieties and incarcerating addictions inhibit the free, easy, and guiltless couplings that were promised to the young over a half-century ago. Add to this the fact that the “flower children” had fewer children, and their progeny did likewise. Decades deprived of fruitful sex have prevented so many children from even joining the ranks of the generations that have followed after these momentous cultural shifts. Little wonder, then, that we feel haunted by the pervasive sense of living in a dwindling culture, one that has lost its very drive to survive.

In the twilight of civilizational decline, that other cultic preoccupation of the 1960s now flourishes. Of the trio, “sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll,” there is ever-waning interest in the first and the last, but drug use, in contrast, has become all the more prevalent. Once medical cannabis was legalized in the early 2000s, a growing chorus of voices called for further relaxations of the prohibitions on its recreational use. Eventually, even conservative commentators and politicians were reluctant to seem restrictive and retrograde, and had recourse to a libertarian shrug out of shame. And so, since 2018, cannabis has been legal in Canada, and the results have been an unmitigated disaster. “Weed” is an apt colloquial term for this substance since it perfectly captures the invasive, destructive spread we have all witnessed in such a short span of time.

There is a world of difference between a bar and an opium den; despite the unconvincing claims of its enthusiasts and advocates, cannabis facilitates no connection with the world or with others. Alcohol can obviously lead to specific kinds of abuses—but these very excesses point back towards the moderation that they miss. There is no parallel to be drawn, then, between alcohol and cannabis, a substance by which the mind can only be “blunted” — hence the name of one of its commonly consumed forms (a blunt). Indeed, cannabis is on a spectrum that ends with psychedelics, which themselves have become increasingly prominent in our culture. In a world without sex, the mysticism of materialism has reverted back to the shamanisms of old.

Recreational drugs of all kinds inculcate the ever-growing assumption that experience is an affliction to be attenuated and dimmed, and that the world is a nightmare to be escaped. A thesis in pop philosophy holds that our conscious life is simply a particularly vivid permutation of a pernicious deception. Drawing on cultural reference points as old as Plato, as prominent as Descartes, and as recent as The Matrix movies, proponents of this “simulation theory” assert that reality itself is merely an illusion. In other words, these seeming sophisticates deny the reality of—and prevent any belief in—a world that is God’s creation; and if there is no world of good to be encountered, then it’s best to retreat into another of one’s own devising: to be drugged, that is, by the sedatives of virtual reality and psychoactive substances.

But the ultimate drug of this kind is not any hallucinogenic, however powerful: rather, it is hemlock. A society that intentionally clouds its own mind and calls this diminishment an amusement has lost the ability to find any meaning in the reality of embodied life—and certainly in the experiences of loss and pain which are such an essential facet of our mortal existence. Ironically, euthanasia and the exit it offers from the world is the natural consequence of the forms of pharmacological disconnection that our society has tolerated.

“God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Gen 1:31). The final verse of the Bible’s first chapter speaks to a truth that has been elided from a world which has become avoidant and benumbed. But His creation remains good, nevertheless—and, because of this fact, the deliberate drug-induced separation that cannabis (and other equally inhibiting substances) induces is evil. It is past time to put an end to the failed experiment of legalized recreational drugs, and to assert that life and its hardships are beautiful, vital, and meaningful. For the world is not an illusion. The greatest illusion is, instead, that very belief: it must, therefore, be rejected, repudiated, and consigned—like so many misspent lives already have been—to the ash heap of history.

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