The Noble Liar by Robin Aitken

Author:Robin Aitken [Robin Aitken]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785904332
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2018-01-21T16:00:00+00:00

This is a surprisingly unequivocal statement which admits to no uncertainty on the matter. The representative body of those American doctors who devote their professional lives to the care of children have come to a strikingly clear-cut view of the matter: pornography is harmful. It is true that other similar bodies – like our own Royal College of Paediatricians and Child Health – have been much more reticent and seem to have no official view at all. Could this be ascribed to simple moral cowardice, reflecting a reluctance by the college to involve itself in public controversy?

In any event, it is surely the case that a strong argument can, and should, be made for censoring pornography, but it is not one that you will hear promoted on the BBC, or indeed anywhere else in the mainstream British media. And that begs the question ‘why not?’ After all, we have now had decades of more or less unrestricted access to pornography and there is much evidence that it is harmful to children and adults. The reason for the deafening silence is that social liberalism has now achieved an intellectual hegemony among media professionals as it has in both the law and education. It seems that there must not be a debate on this matter, because to do so would be to challenge something, which, in the view of prominent liberals like Geoffrey Robertson, underpins the whole edifice of social liberalism. Perhaps if we started to question the wisdom of permitting pornography, other assumptions which are foundational to the new liberal order might also unravel?

Take next the question of divorce. There is a huge amount of academic research into the effects of divorce, and in particular, its effects on children. This is not the place to attempt any sort of comprehensive review of the literature, but what is striking to the lay reader who takes the trouble to have a look at what researchers have discovered, is that there are almost no studies which suggest divorce is beneficial for children. The balance of opinion among those researchers who have examined the question is overwhelmingly that it is a very negative influence on the lives of children. Here is a representative conclusion – one of many that could be cited – this one from the Linacre Quarterly published by the US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health:

Nearly three decades of research evaluating the impact of family structure on the health and well-being of children demonstrates that children living with their married, biological parents consistently have better physical, emotional, and academic well-being. Pediatricians and society should promote the family structure that has the best chance of producing healthy children. The best scientific literature to date suggests that, with the exception of parents faced with unresolvable marital violence, children fare better when parents work at maintaining the marriage. Consequently, society should make every effort to support healthy marriages and to discourage married couples from divorcing.12

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