Sex and the Unreal City

Sex and the Unreal City: The Demolition of the Western Mind
Anthony Esolen
Ignatius Press
2020
209 pages

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This is the twelfth book by well known American author and social critic Anthony Esolen (not counting his translations into English of Dante and other Classical writers). He is very much a man of letters who is concerned about the decline of Western civilisation, and in particular the role being played here by the “flight from content, from memory, from wonder, and from truth” in the Humanities (p.42). He himself lectured in English in Providence College, a Catholic university run by the Dominican Order, until it, in his own words “succumbed to the totalitarian diversity cult”. He is now Writer-in-Residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in New Hampshire. 

Some of the material in this books comes from previously published essays but most of it is new. As the title suggests, the book deals with the malaise affecting the intellectual culture of the West and the role that the sexual revolution has played in this malaise. Esolen uses the device of “the Unreal City” throughout to refer to the City (in St Augustine’s sense of the City of God and the City of Man) that the West has become over the past few decades, and in an accelerated way over the past twenty years. It is “Unreal” because it is built on a repudiation of truth, and ultimately of the objective order of God’s creation. 

Though Esolen divides the book into five sections: Unreality101, The Body Unreal, Unreality for Sale, The Spiritual Chasm, and Return to Reality the same themes recur throughout the different sections. 

The author’s pithy and pugnacious style is reminiscent of G.K.Chesterton, whom he quotes on occasion. He is not afraid to state the truth very baldly. This includes the truth regarding casual sex, abortion, sexual orientation and sexual identity which of course are issues at the epicentre of what has come to be known as “woke culture”. At times his assertions are startling in their frankness, eg: “Feminism says that women and men are not made for one another, and therefore their interests are separable. That is a lie” (p. 43) and  “You cannot say with one breath that there are no differences between men and women, and then say with the next breath that a man can be a woman in a man’s body, or vice versa. If you persist in saying so, you are being more than a poor reasoner. You are a swindler, and you know it” (p. 140).

These are strong words indeed, but they are not gratuitous. Esolen is not trying to be shocking or insulting, but rather making the important point that what lies at the root of movements like transgenderism is not a simple intellectual error regarding human biology. There is something far more profound, and ultimately more disturbing at work here: a rebellion against reality itself, and the Promethean creation of world where man decides what is true or false: the City of the Unreal. 

Esolen knows the dangers of speaking about these issues so clearly in a society which increasingly shows itself prepared to use force to quash dissent. It must use force because, as he writes, “Madmen hate those who see through their madness. Unreality is frail. It must be backed up with force” (p.84). Free speech simply cannot be permitted in such a society: “That diagnostician of political unreality, Eric Voegelin, says that we can tell that a man or a movement or a nation has turned resolutely toward nonbeing when certain questions are disallowed from the beginning” (p.135).

It is easy to relate to his description of the “unreality of our time” as being like falling down a “bottomless crater”: “Every time we reach a new low, and we think to catch our breath and try to find a way up the crater walls, the floor collapses again beneath us, and we are lower than ever before” (p.7). I suspect we have all had similar sensations of disorientation over the past decade as we have struggled to get our minds around the latest woke doctrine: that gender is a social construct, that children can choose their gender, etc.

The author’s combination of beautiful prose with deep insight is striking. In defence of his arguments he cites a great range of writers and thinkers such as Milton, Pascal, Eric Voegelin, Gabriel Marcel, Malcolm Muggeridge, but more than all others he has recourse to the perennial wisdom of William Shakespeare.

It is perhaps the greatest strength of this book to state so clearly that “the battle in our day is theological, whether we wish to admit it or not” (p.40). Perhaps we intuit that what is going on is somehow related to the decline of religion, or the loss of the sense of the sacred, but Esolen goes further to show that what is at stake is at root an attack on the Creator: “The ultimate target of the revolt is the very order of the world as given to us, to conform our passions to that order; the ultimate target is the Creator” (p.140). Other writers have also addressed the growing insanity of Western civilisation (think of Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds) but without reaching the diagnosis that we are in crisis because we have rejected the Creator.

With the Creator gone, all fixed reference points in reality vanish, and we lose all possibility of maintaining our grip on reality: 

I believe in God, the Father, the Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. That belief is reasonable. I can argue for it. I have done so. A corollary of that belief is a trust in the reality and intelligibility and integrity of created things. I like very much what Chesterton wanted to call Saint Thomas Aquinas: Saint Thomas of the Creation, for just that rock-steady trust in what is. So long as you keep your hold on that first tenet of the Creed—and a ‘‘tenet’’ is literally what you grab hold of, like a mountain climber clasping a good firm outcropping of stone—you will not fall into the crevasse of unreality (p.49).

I completely agree with Esolen’s conclusion that Western civilisation’s embrace of atheism is what underlies its decline into madness. In essence we are declining into ever more bizarre forms of idolatry: “Man is made for faith: he is homo credens. If he does not believe in God, he will turn straightaway to some idol, a stock or stone, himself, the state, sex—something stupid, salacious, or malignant, like a cancer. Man without faith becomes credulous” (p.46).

Because Esolen is so strident in his assertion of the madness of the sexual doctrines of wokeness I don’t think that book is one for the vacillating – that would require a work that proceeds a little more softly softly. A person who has been taken in by radical feminism and gender ideology is likely to reject this work tout court. That said, however, it strikes me that others could benefit a great deal from hearing a spade being called a spade with such strong argumentation, expressed with first class prose and adorned with wonderfully apposite quotes from the classics. In a way it is quite reassuring to see someone unambiguously call out the nakedness of the emperor.