The Pornography Culture - David B. Hart: Freedom of Will or Freedom to Rebel?

I just read the following article:

The Pornography Culture - David B. Hart

It is best to print it off and to read it carefully - but I'm convinced this writer is on to something quite important in light of American culture and our predisposition to 'freedoms'. It seems that his critique of 'choice' and 'freedom of the will' in light of a pervasively pornographic society truly makes the Biblical argument that we are not only made in the image of God - but we are all indeed accountable to God - whether we as a society will recognize it or not.

Here's a small sample of Hart's argument:

... it is more than empty nostalgia or neurotic anxiety to ask what virtues men and women living in an ever more pervasively pornographic culture can hope to nourish in themselves or in their children. Sane societies, at any rate, care about such things - more, I would argue, than they care about the 'imperative' of placing as few constraints as possible upon individual expression. But we have made the decision as a society that unfettered personal volition is (almost) always to be prized, in principle, above the object towards which volition is directed. It is in the will - in the liberty of choice - that we place primary value, which means that we must as a society strive, as far as possible, to recognize as few objective goods outside the self as we possibly can.

Of course, we are prepared to set certain objective social and legal limits to the exercise of the will, but these are by their very nature flexible and frail, and the great interminable task of human 'liberation' - as we tend to understand it - is over time to erase as many of these limits as we safely can. The irreducibly 'good' for us is subjective desire, self-expression, self-creation. The very notion that the society we share could be an organically moral realm, devoted as a whole to the formation of the mind or the soul, or that unconstrained personal license might actually make society as a whole less free by making others powerless against the consequences of the 'rights' we choose to exercise, runs contrary to all our moral and (dare one say?) metaphysical prejudices. We are devoted to - indeed, in a sense, we worship - the will; and we are hardly the first people willing to offer up our children to our god.

I highly recommend taking the time to print and read this article.