By David Little and Nathan Chang
Somewhere along the way the 1960s were vilified as the crucial upheaval in American mores, a decade of disintegration where sex was liberated and the family crumbled. This has been the dominant narrative cast by conservatives for the past thirty years. But the storytellers of our time, whether Matthew Warner of Mad Men or Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg of The Pacific have asked us to question our Leave it to Beaver view of history by presenting us with the sexual exploits, broken relationships, and social fragmentation of our “greatest generation.” I must admit that I too am as Horace put it, a praiser of time past, but the past received another blow when I came to the realization that the Christmas pop standard, “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” is from 1944.
The playful duet features what the original score calls a “mouse” and “wolf” dialogue between a girl and a boy in the boy’s apartment, as he tries to convince his date to stay the night. She is reluctant throughout, offering reservation after reservation, and he counters at every turn. First, he uses the “cold outside,” then alcohol, and then his wounded pride as his sexual advances are repeatedly denied. Her parents, her siblings, and her aunt will worry, and her neighbors will “faint” since there’ll be “plenty implied.” She knows she should say no, and yet in the end she consoles herself with the fact that she tried. In the resolution to the song, they both agree that it really is cold outside, and his pride overcomes her honor. The song is not unlike the crass t-shirt slogan that you might hear today in a soberingly half-joking tone, “No means yes.”
Let’s fast forward sixty years to Tom Wolfe being slammed by the critics for painting what has been declared by some, a wildly unrealistic picture of American hook-up culture. Though Wolfe’s setting is back seats and dorm rooms, “Baby It’s Cold Outside” could be I am Charlotte Simmons set to music. There’s cold. There’s alcohol. There’s a boy’s pride. And, there’s Charlotte constantly thinking of what her family will think, even though in this case they’re hundreds of miles away, tucked away in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Much has been said about the changes of this past century that have revolutionized human relationships. Leon Kass details the end of courtship, a practice that was virtually as old as civilization. Beth Bailey explains how our relationships have gone from front porches to back seats, and while I sense rosy-eyed nostalgia in this, I think it’s fair to draw a line between the anonymity made possible by modernity and the sexual liberation of this past century. The reality of our generation is that more so than ever before, our family isn’t on the other side of the screen door, and our neighbors probably don’t even know our names. And because of this we have lost an important check on our appetites and a crucial encouragement toward virtue. The presence of community connected us to the wisdom of generations past and checked our eros until it could be safely channeled within the confines of marriage. We were concerned with our reputations, or in a more robust sense, our honor.
To peg these changes in society on the 1960s, however, isn't enough, and it isn't sufficient to blame the 20th century either. Even when St. Augustine was writing his Confessions, the pervasiveness with which individual passion won out over virtue was painfully felt. He too lived in a time of social fragmentation, where a “caldron of shameful loves seethed and sounded about [him] on every side.” In the case of young Augustine, not even his family cared much about the development of his virtue, instead being preoccupied with his progress in schooling. Certainly, it is not hard to see the relevance of the topic at hand.
And yet this is not cause to jettison our nostalgic sentiments and beliefs in cynical upheaval. In fact, we should take a certain comfort in readjusting our understanding of the relationship between the past and the present. The social fabric may be in disrepair, but this is not cause for despair because they were not perfect either. Nostalgia has a tendency to blind us to the faults of other eras, but we are still drawn to the past because we seek what was good about it. If we are careful to thoroughly understand history in the fullness of its best and worst moments, and in light of the ever-presence of human limitation, nostalgia can be incredibly helpful. To borrow the words of Aristotle, what we seek in the past is “not the ancestral but the good.”
Warner and Spielberg are right to remind us that eros is much older than Leave It To Beaver, that cultural change is much bigger than any one factor, but I don’t think our response to Mad Men should be a jaded realism about the world. There is a place for shattering rosy misconceptions of the past, but if it all leads to despair, there is something wrong. Instead, we should take our disillusionment as a call to confront the present age with the wisdom of our forebears. Human folly is a perennial problem, but culture and its ability to shape how we interact in society are not. Perhaps we can learn something from the time of front porches and old-fashioned courtship rituals. With the wisdom of their age we can work to build tightly knit families, strong communities, and a flourishing culture that is not naïve to the weaknesses of human nature. In doing so we may well restore limits that will protect us from the cauldron of shameful loves that tempt Charlotte, the boy and girl of the song, and ourselves.
This piece was subsequently published over at The Washington Institute.
This piece was subsequently published over at The Washington Institute.
