Sex and the Unreal City: The Demolition of the Western Mind by Anthony Esolen

Sex and the Unreal City: The Demolition of the Western Mind Reviews

• 
  Becky Pliego

  Fantastic. Esolen is brilliant and his writing is poignant, engaging, and true.
  
  It is worth mentioning that Dr. Esolen is a Roman Catholic which means that many times we argue towards the same conclusion from a different angle (I’m a Reformed Presbyterian) and (edited to add) other times, we end up not agreeing at all.
  
  Read this book, is 100% worth your time.
  
  
• 
  Albert Norton

  People who don’t thrive in life, in prosperous countries like the UK and the US, generally don’t really suffer from privation, but rather from bad ideas. These bad ideas trickle down to them from the cultural elite. I would go further and say they create or broaden the underclass, meaning that people who in a more innocent time might have lived modestly but successfully would now slip under the rope into an arena of addiction, indolence, dependence, and loss of dignity. The corrosive ideologies include the Rousseauian idea that people are basically good, and so we should apply a therapeutic approach to everything. The belief that self-reliance should give way to socialist inter-dependence. Postmodern moral relativism, expressed in feminism, queer theory, and Marxist identity politics.
  
  In 1960, 95% of children lived with both biological parents, in both affluent and working-class families. By 2005 that percentage was 85% in affluent families, but only 30% in working-class families. These sorry statistics are provided by Rob Henderson in an article in Quillette magazine from Nov. 16, 2019 called Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class—A Status Update. You can find it at quillette.com. Henderson argues that the bad ideas are beliefs formed among the elites as a kind of status symbol to take the place of old-school material symbols like fancy watches and fur coats. Elites still feel a need to self-identify as elite, but through "luxury beliefs," including having the government mostly raise children, rather than parents; drug legalization; open borders; loose sexual norms. The whole identity balkanization implied in use of terms like “heteronormative,” “cisgender,” “white privilege,” “cultural appropriation,” and so on. Political activism is a way to display one’s luxury beliefs signifying elite membership.
  
  Anthony Esolen’s book Sex and the Unreal City, relates to this idea of “luxury beliefs.” Esolen calls “unreality” the collection of lies we’re expected to consume, digest, and make a part of our waking reality. We call that “political correctness,” meaning deceptive misdirection through abuse of language. It grates against our certainty of objective reality until that certainty is smoothed down and worn away by lapidary repetition, making the lies a substitute for reality and our objections reducible to inexpressible uneasy qualms adding to the general and increasing tension of social life.
  
  Esolen writes of the unreality as manifested in political correctness:
  
  "How many are the things we cannot discuss now, in the public arena, . . . The five-alarm fire of unreality that is the “transgender” movement is not, as is sometimes alleged, misogynist. It is just the overheating and the extension of the four-alarm fire of unreality that was feminism to begin with. Feminism says that women and men are not made for one another, and therefore their interests are separable. That is a lie. Transgenderism agrees with the lie and adds that a woman can be made into a man, or vice versa, or perhaps back and forth by turns, as happened to Tiresias of old."
  
  What are we not supposed to ask about? Esolen gives examples, including these:
  
  Whether certain cultures might be superior to others;
  Whether certain religious traditions get closer to the truth of God than others;
  Whether God might love us so much that He reveals Himself in person;
  Whether men and women are actually interchangeable;
  Whether young children are better off with parents or institutions;
  Whether sex as purely recreation makes us weak and vulnerable;
  About black children growing up without a father; and
  About black children, and other children, routinely dismembered in the womb.
  
  “What most oppresses man is not physical but spiritual, that is, an attack not on a particular political stance but on the very notion of truth itself.” Here’s Esolen’s succinct understanding of unfreedom and freedom:
  
  "People are not free because they get to cast a marked piece of confetti for their distant rulers but because their distant rulers have only very distant things to do with them, if anything at all. Liberty is to be defined not by how many things you or your representatives get to vote about, . . . but rather by how many things no one needs to vote about, or no one dares to vote about, because they get done by ordinary people pursuing their own good and the common good in ordinary ways."
  
  In this day we seem allergic to the notion of freedom as an end unto itself. Perhaps it resonates if we observe how damaging is its loss to the least among us, as Esolen does by summarizing the ideology and laying its consequences squarely at the feet of cultural elites (and here you see the tie-in to “luxury beliefs”):
  
  "[H]edonism in sexual matters, and statism in everything else: the combination that characterizes Huxley’s Brave New World. A dreadful combination. And I think that its promoters, who benefit from it handsomely, understand deep down that it is dreadful; they probably suspect that our supine acceptance of mores that eviscerate the poor, robbing them of their only fund of capital, which is moral and familial, has been calamitous for the very people they purport to assist."
• 
  John

  All over the place, as it's an assemblage of previously written online short pieces, the professor admits. Compared to his aphoristic "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization" or his grim "Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture," this new loosely knitted series of essays benefits by the gradual accumulation of his argument. Not a new one, and one anybody reading the typical Ignatius Press jeremiad, from the source of conservative Catholicism this generation will find.
  
  Still, Esolen, a translator of Dante lucky enough to have studied under Robert Hollander at Princeton, does arrange impressively cited excerpts from Paradise Lost and King Lear in particular (more than Dante this time; Esolen's treated him in depth already) into support for his defense of the resister to the Unreal City, which recalls the awful citadel of infernal Dis drawn so vividly by the Florentine master. As for sex, Esolen's against the gay rights and transgender movements, unsurprisingly. His eloquence on the abandonment of still-living fetuses during abortion procedures made me wince with pity. And Esolen evokes the scattered allegiances or betrayals that multiply amidst a culture of sexual obsession and commitment-scarce regression which leaves children and parents alike adrift.
  
  Where this lamentation winds up, however, does show Esolen's ambition: to return our screen-addled gaze to the necessary vision, that made in the image of a Creator and incarnated indelibly. This Christian approach emerges organically, part of Esolen's own decision to withdraw from an increasingly liberalized and secularized college founded in the Catholic tradition to a newer, far smaller enclave where the liberal arts and its place within the structure of philosophy and of theology attracts a few fellow aspirants. But most readers, likely by far less willing or able to return to their days of searching as youth for wisdom, let alone in such ideal settings, may draw their own guidance from Esolen's spirited appeal to a more ascetic, less material, and freshly cleansed view of another type of otherworldly construction, that which his own beloved Dante depicted so memorably eight centuries ago. Those to whom this entreaty appeals will find Esolen's perspective refreshing. Those to whom such an assertion of time-honored values and sacred transformation of the sinful human will be discarded as outdated or dismissed as delusional, those least probable to pick up this book, sadly will languish among those Dante portrayed, in shadows rather than light.
• 
  Jon Anderson

  Stupendous
• 
  Rusten

  This book is a level headed tirade against modern "unrealism" and an apologetic for Christian Realism.
  
  "...God has not made us for untruth, and if we embrace untruth, we hug nothingness, and we begin to evacuate our souls, till In the end all That remains is a wraith where a fully realized soul should have been, a shell of humanity.
  
  Every time, then, we encounter an untruth about man, or every time we meet people who behave as if the true worship of God were holy or principally in our determination rather than being bestowed upon us by God as a gift, we look upon a person or an institution set on the brink of chasm, blithely unaware of it, and apt to fall into the nothingness with the next false step. No one who sees the brink and the certain destruction that threatens can say, "It does not matter which step we take." But people around us do say that all the time. I suggest here that that is not because they feel the solid earth under their feet--the good, solid, dependable foundation of this God-created reality. It is because they no longer feel anything under their feet. For them the world itself has been thinned out into a dream, as supposition, a set of opinions. "I am my own light", says the liar, and he shuts his eyes, and dances towards what is not there.
  
  Esolen is at his best in this one.
• 
  Mike Fendrich

  Anthony Esolen is one of the most cogent, thoughtful (and sometimes snarky) commentators of the absurdity we call western civilization now. In "Sex and the Unreal City", Dr. Esolen exposes us for what we are; stumbling through unreal lives with unreal expectations and very real lies that we live by. Because I am an historically orthodox, confessional Protestant, I have theological differences with Dr. Esolen, but that does not deter from the insights and wisdom of this book (and his other writings). I think this is the fifth or sixth book of his that I have read and have found each to be a treasure trove of thoughtful wisdom that is not afraid to look in the mirror to discover who we (individually and corporately) are. We believe lies and live in an unreal, non-sustainable context that will come crashing down. And we love it so.
  
  Dr. Esolen, thank you for yet another gift. May people read and contemplate this book, stop, take a breath, and look for the sure and certain reality. Jesus is Risen and is returning. The creation screams this and we stick our fingers in our ears and say we are wise. But the fool says there is no God.
  
  Read this book.
  
  Sola Scriptura
  
• 
  Skye Staker

  “The soul thirsts for truth. There is its homeland; there is its joy. I do not long for a happy feeling, so that I then can call it truth. I long for the truth, and the truth brings me peace.”
  
  4.5 stars!✨ Dr. Esolen is an amazing man with an amazing soul and testimony. I loved this book and it’s focus on passing by the errors and isms of the world and instead living a REAL life. It was a fascinating read with so many wonderful points and quotes I can’t even count. I love the author’s focus on God being the source of all truth and light, and that we can only live real lives if we are living lives cast in the beautiful light of the Son.
  
  The author tackles many controversial subjects that we deal with in our current day and age, and does so with unapologetic boldness, rooted in truth and courage. I loved his ability to stand by the laws of God and not the laws of man.
  
  I can’t wait to continue to explore more books by Dr. Esolen as this one was just so excellent and so thought provoking. Definitely recommend!✨
• 
  Bill

  This is an amazing book. It cannot be speed-read, because every word is important to understanding why our modern society seems to be bent on declaring that up is down and in is out. For instance, if there is no difference between men and women, why is it that so many seemingly healthy people are willing to undergo radical surgery and hormone treatments in an effort to become a member of the opposite sex?
  
  Dr. Esolen has given us a relatively little volume that is packed with what used to be considered common sense. Having read many of his books, it is no surprise that he has come up with another classic!
• 
  Joe Long

  Dr. Esolen's at his brilliant best, in this book of reflections. I read this one highlighter-in-hand and found a great many thoughts to return to.
  
  They're not particularly encouraging thoughts, regarding our society; the demolition of the Western mind has not been a pretty process, nor is it an easily reversible one. However, an accurate description of the problem is the starting point for doing anything useful about it, and an accurate description with some poetic fire to it is good for the morale.
• 
  essie

  Esolen as pointed and poignant as ever. He points us to what we all must turn to, what is true reality and what should be our foundation and our all, the Gospel. A timely and necessary work for our day.
• 
  Larry Kaufmann

  Sex and the Unreal City is stunning and overflowing with wisdom. Fresh, sometimes astonishing insights are printed on nearly every page. Buy it, read it, and keep it close at hand on your bookshelf; you'll want to revisit this book often.
• 
  Matt

  This is that rarest of modern compositions - a book that ought to be read more than once. It is at the same time fascinating, enlightening, devastating, and hopeful.