“Porn is Slowly Killing Evangelicalism” by Grayson Gilbert, Evangelical Patheos: June 12, 2018.
“Of Rats, Voles and Online Porn” by Declan Gernon, Areo, February 12, 2019.
“Does Empathy Have A Dark Side?” by Jonathan Lambert, NPR, April 12, 2019.
Full-page ads in the Christian Right’s World magazine carry stats on “pornography and the church”, alleging “68% of church-going men and over 50% of pastors view porn on a regular basis” and, “Of young Christian adults 18-24 years old, 76% actively search for porn” and “87 percent of Christian women have watched porn.” Whether these ads that elicit World customers are primarily prompting guilt or providing alibis is uncertain.
Gilbert is finishing graduate work at Moody Bible Institute. He admits past distractions with porn. His honesty gives credence to his article. He’s now a husband and a father.
Lamenting evangelical failure to address the problem, he notes the connection of porn to sex trafficking and a multibillion-dollar industry as well as its negative effects on the brain and its impact on marriage. One effect of porn-induced orgasms that he fails to mention is that, novelty-soaked porn reinforces an “incest taboo”, i.e., “sex is dirty” and not “family friendly”. “The Talk”, then, between a dad and his son, gets delayed as too embarrassing to both. And, since “porn is hot”, it unfairly fights against the quite fitting familiarity of marital sex. In citing some Gallup findings that, “43% of people believe [porn] is morally acceptable [with a] steady growth of acceptance in nearly every category”, Gilbert does not detect a likely distinction between what the polled say they “believe” and what they do believe. With a topic such as porn, rationalizing runs rampant.
He doesn’t mention what’s probably the most common motive for turning to porn, i.e., fear of sexual rejection, whether in dating or in marriage. But, an orgasmic linkage to such “hiding” of one’s merely imagined self-image reinforces one’s self-induced fear of rejection. “Hiding” one’s “self-image” fails to facilitate a savvy sidestepping of one’s own subjective sense of self. Erotic fantasies evaporate into disappointment, emptiness and guilt, but this experience is entirely predictable since, fantasies are mere fantasies.
Gernon claims: “The majority of people who watch porn online do so recreationally, with little ill effect.” How naïve! Porn viewing is hidden from peers for fear they’d see the viewer as a loser who can’t get any real “action”, and it’s hidden from a spouse to avoid conflict. In either case, there’s this ill effect of this uneasy aftermath of secrecy. Gernon mentions that, in a study of men viewing porn, they looked “uncannily” like rats pushing levers for dopamine responses, “desperately seeking their next fix, clicking the mouse just as the rats pushed the lever.” He then relays reports of a genetic difference between “promiscuous” meadow voles and pair-bonding prairie voles. The former, lacking vasopressin receptors, are “promiscuous” while the latter, are not. He says that similar results are found in men, with or without the discriminating genes.
But, men are not rodents (though some are called “rats”). So, there’s more in store than a dopamine jolt for viewers of porn. Men, unlike wild animals, choose, and cope with self-esteem, and must face psychosocial, cultural, economic, legal, and religious parameters connected with porn, all of these, interacting with biology and chemistry.
National Public Radio’s Lambert interviewed Fritz Breithaupt, director of the Indiana University Experimental Humanities Lab and author of, The Dark Sides of Empathy. Breithaupt wisely observes that, “Humans are very quick to take sides. And when you take one side, you take the perspective of that side. You can see the painful parts of that perspective and empathize with them, and that empathy can fuel seeing the other side as darker and darker. … Sometimes we commit atrocities not out of a failure of empathy but rather as a direct consequence of successful, even overly successful, empathy”. He notes terrorists, fighting for “the oppressed” against “the oppressor” as an example of this. But, such “empathy” might rather be regarded as rationalization. NPR’s piece does not mention different sides on, e.g., LGBT issues or abortion, but Breithaupt’s point applies to these controversies, whether the focus is on LGBT rights or religious rights, or on the life of the unborn child or on the choice of the pregnant woman.
He keenly notes: “If you want the victims to say ‘thank you’, you may even want to keep the people you help in that position of inferior victim because it can sustain your feeling of being a hero.” It also can keep you employed in HR or in political office!
Breithaupt recognizes the faulty motivations of ego-driven “empathizers”, absorbed with their own rationalized self-interests. “Helicopter” and “snowplow” parents, and those who pay multimillion-dollar bribes so that their kids can get into prestigious colleges, as if the kids qualified, so that the parents can brag, are examples of this. Unprepared, the kids will likely flunk out – an unintended consequence of “empathy”.
Mixed results, side effects and unintended consequences of “empathy” shouldn’t be surprising. Social projects, prompted by supposed empathy, unravel in unintended, yet even forewarned, consequences, e.g., The Great Society, War on Poverty, Affirmative Action, The War on Drugs, et al. Leeches, lobotomies, electroshock therapy, Freudian notions, fads of repressed memories, deinstitutionalizing of the seriously mentally ill, propagandized denials that HIV caused AIDS, New Age “self-love” as the cure for AIDS, “ex-gay” claims to make homosexuals “straight”, fads of “self-esteem”, “positive thinking” and “happiness pursuit”, the anti-vaccine cult, Big Tech’s censorship of politically incorrect ideologies labeled “hate speech”, cosmetic surgery for depression – all are examples of “empathy” gone awry.
A clinician tells The Times of London about her professional reaction to current fast-tracking of children into sex-changes, including dangerously consequential puberty blocking: “It felt as if we were a part of something that people would look back on in the future, and ask, ‘What were we thinking?’”
Antidotes to foolish “empathy” are found in the introspective assignment of “The Golden Rule” and in the good sense of the Hippocratic Oath, “First, Do No Harm.” With an appreciative nod to Alexander Pope, let’s all remember that: “Fools [still, and always will] rush in where angels fear to tread” and “A little learning is [and always will be] a dangerous thing”.