The Neoconservative Case for Porn

Boonton tells me that I have misread Bret Stephens:

Matthew opens his attack on Stephens by making a red herring out of his argument. His argument is that America’s committment to freedom includes both the noble and ignoble. He mistranslates that as a claim that “porn is good because the hijackers hated it”.

Actually, Stephens claims that pornography will help us transform the Muslim world and remake it in our airbrushed image. He has made the neoconservative case for porn.

It was people like Stephens (most of whom were well-intentioned) who urged us to embark on a misguided and disastrous invasion that, they said, would spread the seeds of democracy in the Middle East. It seemed plausible to my 17 year-old self that a massive assertion of American military might change the direction of a region. But I don’t think it has, and even if it still somehow does, it’s not worth the blood and treasure we have poured into the sand.

Watching the failure of the neo-conservative project over the past decade has made me skeptical when the same people return and promise a new means of transforming the same societies. They doggedly persist in the same line of thinking, with no acknowledgment of past failures other than a desperate grasping after less and less plausible tools of transformation. To wit:

There was a time when liberals believed that rock’n’roll would change the world. They were right, though not in the way most of them imagined. Instead, in places like communist Czechoslovakia—where Vaclav Havel took inspiration from the likes of Lou Reed—and today in the repressive lands of Islam, the sensual currents of Western life exert a constant and ineradicable attraction, even as they also provoke censorious and violent reactions.

The anecdotal evidence I assembled about pornography and jihadism in my last post is neither conclusive nor exhaustive. I don’t mean for it to carry any argument too far. Nonetheless, having listened to arguments like Stephens’ for many years, I very much doubt that the proliferation of pornography he cheers will lead to some kind of widespread political transformation.

If you think porn is fine, then fine. If you think it is bad, then I agree with you. If you think, like Mr. Stephens, that it will lead to a blossoming of democracy in the Middle East, you’re going to be disappointed.

And Boonton, that’s a beautiful dog.