David Bentley Hart: Freedom and Decency
It is heartening, naturally, to live in a country where so much righteous ire can be stirred by a fleeting glimpse of something the unarrested sight of which — on almost any summer day along certain sandy banks of the Seine — nourishes the noonday reveries of many a Parisian schoolboy. It attests to the persistence among us of the kind of social virtue — call it bourgeois respectability, or puritanism, or simple decency — that is too often appreciated only in the aftermath of its disintegration. That said, however, there is still something odd in the symbolic importance this event has assumed for many, given that far worse evidences of the rapid coarsening of our culture surround us on every side all the time (examples are too numerous and obvious to cite). I suspect that among those who professed their dismay at the halftime show there were many who as a rule are willing to tolerate most of the corrosive influences that invade family life — from advertising, films, popular music, the Internet, video games, the language we have all become accustomed to hearing every day — so long as those influences continue unobtrusively to operate in their “proper” places.