Ben Sasse: preference

Transcript context

…Overrated. [laughter] Overrated. But if you think of the distinction between childhood and adulthood as dependency and then ultimately becoming independent. Why adolescence is a glorious gift — again, it’s a concept that’s only about two millennia old — is that we came to believe that you could hit puberty, you could become biologically an adult, and you don’t have to be fully independent immediately. You don’t have to be emotionally, morally, financially, in terms of household structure or school leaving. You don’t have to be an adult and independent all on your own immediately. It’s a pretty glorious thing to get this kind of 18-months to four-year greenhouse phase as you transition from dependent childhood to independent adulthood. But it’s impossible to not understand — and Rousseau obviously clearly understands — that a whole bunch of the anxiety of this moment is the fact that your body goes from being a kid to being somebody who’s able to reproduce. You’ve got to have, not just the apron strings moment of your six-year-old, where you realize you can be away from mom for 6 or 10 or 12 hours a day and not die, but you actually have an emotional cutting of the strings with your parents that you can go from your family of origin to a family of your creation and choice and procreation. That adolescent transition stage is highly wrapped up in sexuality. And I don’t think you can think meaningfully about generations without thinking a little bit about procreation. So, even though I 100 percent wanted to avoid sex because I think we don’t have enough commonality, and I didn’t want to be drawn into culture wars anywhere in this book. Ken Burns has the great phrase that right now we have a whole lot of pluribus and very, very little unum. [laughter] commonality, and I didn’t want to be drawn into culture wars anywhere in this book. Ken Burns has the great phrase that right now we have a whole lot of pluribus and very, very little unum. [laughter] And if you think of what Ken Burns’s work is about: Jazz, and baseball, and Civil War, and Lewis and Clark, and the Dust Bowl, and his new project about to come out on Vietnam — one of the things that he’s trying to do is give us a common canon. He’s trying to give us some shared experiences, the things we can agree on before we get to policy fights. Because policy and legislative fights, they just aren’t big enough to form your tribe around. It’s really, really lame to think that these parties are that interesting. I want more things that we can unite around as a people before we get to meaningful and often important policy fights. But if you’re going to think about those things we can unite around, I don’t want to get sucked right back into 1960s echoes of the culture war, and yet I didn’t feel like I could do justice to a chapter on the body and on generations without saying that sex has purposes. And there aren’t two and there aren’t ninety-two. There are basically three purposes to sex. Sex is a covenant, initiation, and renewal ceremony. Sex gives you a different kind of knowledge of someone. You form a kind of bond with someone that’s different than just a random person on the street. Sex matters. Sex is for procreation and sex is for pleasure. There really isn’t much more to it than that. And yet those three things should be differentiated because it’s not just another contact sport. I don’t think it’s helpful to have teenagers not know that sex matters, and yet you can understand it. When you’re old and you look back on your sexuality, I bet most people are going to think it was basically reducible to those three kinds of categories. So I felt like I had to talk about it a little bit, but I wanted to duck the culture wars as much as possible.…

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