Awash in Vice
Runaway levels of porn, pot, gambling, and more are metastasizing in our society.
My new piece is online today in The Wall Street Journal. Called “America Is Awash in Vice” (gift link, but apparently it doesn’t necessarily get you though), it’s about how the decline of religion promised personal liberation but led instead to a tidal wave of vice.
You hear a lot less about the mafia than you used to. One reason is that federal law enforcement has done a great job of breaking up their criminal networks. But that’s not the only reason. Society has legalized much of what the mafia used to do—gambling, drugs and pornography. America is now a post-vice society.
Once largely confined to Las Vegas and Atlantic City, N.J., gambling is now legal in all but a handful of states. Advertisements for sports-betting apps are ubiquitous, and professional sports leagues have partnered with gambling companies. About half of 18-49 year-old men have online betting accounts. Almost all are destined to be losers. Sports betting is reducing savings and increasing bankruptcy and domestic-abuse rates.
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Finally, there’s porn, now delivered at industrial scale in high-definition video for free online. Adult models can now set up their own personal porn delivery accounts, where desperate men pay for parasocial relationships with their favorites. The Trump administration likes this business model so much it’s handing out coveted O-1B visas, designed for individuals with “extraordinary” creative talent, to OnlyFans models. Sex trafficking and child sexual abuse are common in the online pornography world.
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The strong Protestant influence created an emphasis on moral reform and vice suppression. Examples include the Comstock Act of 1873, which banned the sending of obscene material in the mail; the Mann Act of 1910, which banned interstate prostitution; and most famously, the temperance movement, which culminated in Prohibition. While some of these efforts may have gone too far at times, they served to keep a lid on the private harms and public blight associated with vice.
Click over to read the whole thing.
You may also be interested in my piece on why men (and women) today should reject vice.
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Cover image: A man smoking pot in Las Vegas by Vapor Vanity/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
It's not just the decline of Christianity; it's a decline in the quality of Christians themselves as watchdogs for ethics and morality. One of the most disgusting, dispiriting things in my adult life has been watching adults and religious figures from my 90s childhood shift from solemnly insisting on the critical importance of "character" for public servants when Clinton was in office to the most obscene mental backflips to excuse everything Trump (or any other national Republican figure) did or does. Christians all of them....ostensibly.
Our society had good empirical reasons to prohibit prostitution, gambling and drugs when it did so, in most cases, over 100 years ago. But over generations we forget what it was like in the before-times. Contemporary views of history assume that these laws were made for puritanical religious reasons or from bigotry. In recent times, well-organized lobbies of enthusiasts and entrepreneurs spread the myth that these activities are harmless. If we understood our history better, we would be less inclined to make the same mistakes over again.