The Intellectual Roots of the Sexual Revolution
The new sexual morality did not emerge from a vacuum. Massive intellectual changes at a worldview level over the last two hundred years set the stage for the revolution in which we currently find ourselves. We are living in times rightly, if rather awkwardly, described as the late modern age. Just a decade ago, we spoke of the postmodern age , as if modernity had given way to something fundamentally new. Like every new and self-declared epoch, the postmodern age was declared to be a form of liberation. Whereas the modern age announced itself as a secular liberation from a Christian authority that operated on claims of divine revelation, the postmodern age was proposed as a liberation from the great secular authorities of reason and rationality. The postmodern age, it was claimed, would liberate humanity by operating with an official “incredulity toward all metanarratives.” In other words, postmodernity denied all of the big narratives that had previously shaped the culture and spe