I think people misunderstand how experimentation works on a social scale. Innovation doesn’t render up its results immediately, it renders them up on a generational time scale.

When you run an experiment, when you genuinely innovate with the structure of society and truly try something new and different and disruptive and progressive, you cannot tell what the results and value of that change is in two years, or even five, or ten. You need about two generations. For two reasons: first, there have to be enough people involved in the experiment. In order for a social experiment to take place you need a large sample size, large enough that it affects the overall basis and structure of the society. That takes time.

Having enough participants doesn’t just mean having the popular consent or general momentum to push some change into the culture. It means you need to erode enough of the previously existing structure and get enough people into the new one. Not just as an innovation, but as the new status quo. You don’t need everyone to convert or be replaced, but you need a critical social mass that has assimilated to the new status quo, sufficiently to be able to take it for granted and not be living in or off of the old structure.

Second, you need time to collect the results. Real social changes don’t just affect you in one moment or one phase of your life; they affect the whole social fabric, which encompasses children up through the elderly, all the people living at one time. So you need to see the experiment played through the generational span. That takes time too. Especially if you’re messing with something big, deep, consequential, or fundamental to the structure of human society. Like, for example, sex.

The truth is, we largely made up our minds about the sexual revolution sixty years ago, but the actual data is only just beginning to come in now. Meanwhile, we haven’t held still, we’ve kept innovating and experimenting and radically changing the mechanisms of social activity through immense technological innovation at a rate never before seen.

That makes it pretty hard to understand the results of our actions. Previous societies had tens of thousands of years across which to test ideas, in an environment that really challenged and tested them back, but in which social conditions were relatively stable and you had immediate access to the generations previous and following to observe the effect of any changes.

For all that we moderns pretend to scientific sophistication, previous generations were more careful and patient in their experimentation and took judging the results very seriously, because they knew with a keenness that we lack that their lives depended on what they were experimenting with. They lacked academic objectivity because they lacked the protections of academic distance. If their experiments failed, they paid the price in quite tangible and painful returns. That taught them a certain respect for caution and conservatism. In a world where most innovation results in failure, and failure often means death or poverty, not for some subject but for you personally, you learn to take experimentation seriously. Those of us who stand today as the inheritors of all this struggle and achievement are so drunk our own own present technological power, though, that we think we can do anything and wield our power with a lack of cautiousness that argues for immaturity and carelessness rather than sophistication.

The sexual revolution isn’t something that is over and in the past and settled, it is something that has only just now arrived and can begin to be viewed properly. Lord only knows under what conditions our current experiments will one day be reviewed. Like light from the furthest stars when the heavens are altered, it takes time for great deeds to travel and for the changes to be seen.