Yin and Yang, Sleaze and Moralizing

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A study released in October reported that Americans have less sex than everyone thought they did. In 1994 they were probably too busy moralizing.

More exactly, they may have been too caught up in the uniquely double- jointed exercise of 1) worrying about the deterioration of American morals, and 2) savoring every lurid manifestation of the decadence. Americans, in other words, found themselves torn between enjoying filthy pleasures guaranteed by the First Amendment and wistfully admiring the Singapore caning. By such almost unconscious dialectics, the people worked at sifting out the rules for a society paganized by sheer information and searching for a moral grid. Where are the morals to discipline the freedom that permits the sleaze in an inside-out culture of exposure? Moral processing is now the chief American art form and preoccupation.

This was the year when Puritanism (the oldest ghostly American mind-body reflex) went into business with advanced post-Modernist integrated id-sleaze. That was it: the American superego officially merged, at last, with the American id. Or anyway the two were fighting it out like cats in a gunnysack.

To see a small dramatization of the merger, look at the best movie of 1994 (some critics say): Pulp Fiction, wherein professional killers engage in 1) savagely flippant violence, and 2) boyishly earnest moralism. A torrent of casual, brutal obscenity flows through discussions marked by a strange, scholastic nicety.

The metaphysical catfight engaged moral extremes that put William J. Bennett's The Book of Virtues on the best-seller list for the entire 52 weeks, while the world watched a regular Ring cycle of gaudy, televised, weirder- than-fiction unvirtue. The Nicole Brown Simpson murder was merely the most riveting segment.

The dialectic is disorienting. On the one hand, the present time seems dramatically immoral, one of the sleazier, stupider, more violent periods of American history. On the other hand -- or perhaps merely as a result -- Americans have become the world's most relentless moralizers, engaged in moral improvisation and soul-searching with a focused anguish not seen since the days of St. Anthony and the desert monks.

The most intimate dimension of privacy, even the most disreputable (the more shameful the better, in fact), goes public. The significance of the phenomenon (the messiest personal or aberrational details of lives blown up to big- screen public dimensions) cannot be overstated. When people speak of the negativity of the time, this is what they mean -- the disassembly (usually electronic) of proportions and expectations: the energy released by a world turned inside out. The change may be an improvement. Sometimes it merely works like a slow-motion nuclear device dropped into the social order.