Sex in a Secular Age

I haven't read Charles Taylor's new book yet, but the excerpt in Commonweal is certainly a lively read.  Here is a passage that connects directly with our ongoing discussions about the content of (and, relatedly, the increasingly "invincible ignorance" of) the natural law:

The sexual revolution, then, was moved by a complex of moral ideas in which discovering one’s authentic identity and demanding that it be recognized was connected to the goal of equality, the rehabilitation of the body and sensuality, and the overcoming of the divisions between mind and body, reason and feeling. We cannot treat it simply as an outbreak of hedonism.

Of course, the fact that the sexual revolution was motivated by a single interconnected ideal did nothing to guarantee that the ideal would be realized. The hard discontinuities and dilemmas that beset human sexual life, and that most ethics tend to ignore or downplay, had to assert themselves: the impossibility of integrating the Dionysian into a continuing way of life, the difficulty of containing the sensual within a continuing intimate relation, the impossibility of escaping gender roles altogether, and the great obstacles to redefining them, at least in the short run. Not to mention that the celebration of sexual release could generate new ways in which men could objectify and exploit women. A lot of people discovered the hard way that there were dangers as well as liberation in throwing over the codes of their parents.

Still, we have to recognize that the moral landscape has changed. People who have been through the upheaval have to find forms that allow for long-term loving relations between equal partners who will in many cases also want to become parents and bring up their children in love and security. But these can’t be simply identical to the codes of the past, insofar as they were connected with the denigration of sexuality, horror at the Dionysian, fixed gender roles, or a refusal to discuss identity issues. It is a tragedy that the codes that churches want to urge on people still (at least seem to) suffer from one or more-and sometimes all-of these defects.

The inability is made the more irremediable by the unfortunate fusion of Christian sexual ethics with certain models of the “natural,” even in the medical sense. This not only makes them hard to redefine; it also hides from view how contingent and questionable this fusion is, how little it can be justified as intrinsically and essentially Christian. The power of this fused vision to put people off is at its greatest in our age of authenticity, with a widespread popular culture in which individual self-realization and sexual fulfillment are interwoven.

When a Catholic philosopher with the intellectual firepower of Charles Taylor sees natural law claims as masking contigencies, can we really expect philosophy to lead to a  rationally compelling articulation of the natural law?