Posted on 02/04/2004 4:16:09 PM PST by AreaMan
This article is a version of Mr. Anderson's chapter on Ridicule in "This Will Hurt: The Restoration of Virtue and Civic Order," just out from National Review Books.
Modern society prides itself on its knowledge. But a society without taboos knows nothing for certain.
Digby Anderson
Necrophilia is the erotic attraction to corpses. There is no exclusivity here. The corpse may be old or young, male or female, human or animal, stranger or relative, one’s own recently departed mother or a sheep taken at random from the abattoir. Various aspects of necrophilia are illegal and, insofar as it is mentioned at all, it is to my limited knowledge, socially disapproved of. Or, if you prefer we could say that necrophiliacs are politically repressed and socially discriminated against, their rights to free sexual expression systematically denied.
Suppose you wanted to champion the oppressed necrophiliac – not only to free him from legal shackles but to have his sexual identity and lifestyle considered normal, as normal as that of a “normal” married couple – how might you go about your campaign? You might call a philosopher. He would explain that absolute moral standards were not the issue in this multicultural society. Today we are enlightened enough to tolerate and even affirm others’ lifestyles provided they do not harm third parties. He could easily show that necrophilia harms no one in the usual and moral use of that term. Not a single complaint has ever been made by the object of a necrophiliac’s attentions. Would that we could say the same about the violence within traditional marriage! And necrophilia is essentially a private affair. Much quoting of John Stuart Mill would take place. Our philosopher might recognize that necrophilia is thought outlandish but point out that if we persecute every idea thought outlandish we will end as a very repressive society. He might then catalogue all the items once thought outlandish which are now understood to be perfectly normal.
A classical liberal economist could easily be found to talk impressively about costs imposed on others, externalities, private and public goods, and Pareto optimality. He would reach a conclusion similar to the philosopher’s: it hurts no one. A psychoanalyst would go further and point out that necrophiliacs were more likely to hurt others if their desires were repressed than if they were indulged. Indeed those desires might be transferred to live objects. Necrophiliacs should be no only allowed to practice but encouraged to talk about their practices. Assorted necrophiliac activists would then sift through history to find all sorts of generals, kings, bishops, and scientists who were necrophiliacs or would have been had they not lived in societes irrationally prejudiced against necrophilia. They would produce a survey which showed that 27 per cent of the American population had had or had fantasized a necrophiliac episode, and that these included taxpayers and men who had fought for their country. The final card to win the game would be a statement by a leading sculptor or novelist that the denial of necrophilia was a denial of artistic and creative freedom.
The idea of a campaign to promote necrophilia is not as fantastic, if I may use that word, as it might seem. Currently there is a case before the European Court concerning the “rights” of sado-masochists to hurt each other in various perverted ways.
More generally, Western societies have seen a series of behaviors, once thought evil, perverse, or just plain barmy, solemnly argued for as normal and very quickly accepted as such. Take the case of illegitimacy, once thought an occasion for shame; or that of vegetarianism, once thought, for instance by Orwell, to be the sure sign of a crank; or that of homosexuality. All these have become accepted, at least officially, as being normal of equivalent worth to the bearing of children in wedlock, traditional food, and heterosexuality. And the journey from being thought outlandish to being affirmed as normal is taking less and less time. And there are others. Consider the way counseling, a practice almost entirely without a tested scientific basis, now sits in our hospitals alongside sophisticated surgery and elaborately tested pharmaceuticals; or the eay a society steeped in the sophisticated wisdom of Christianity and Judaism has easily fallen for New Age nonsense and Mother Earth sorcery.
Ii is important to remember that these behaviors were once not just disapproved of. They were seen as obviously wrong or barmy, things to be dismissed “out of hand,” without discussion, as ridiculous to be laughed at. This suggests questions. Is there anything that modern society is capable of dismissing out of hand? Is it condemned to considering all behaviors and views solemnly, weighing the pros and cons? Is ridicule out? And is there something about the way modern society solemnly reviews what was once thought perverted and barmy that makes it very likely that it will accord that behavior normal status? Because if all is to be normal then nothing will be, and all will be chaos.
The road to loss of judgment and proportion looks at first so rational. Modern society is scientific and democratic, and so if believes in debate. But it has deified debate. The old society believed in debate, but not about everything. It knew in its bones that necrophilia was deeply disgusting. The feeling of disgust and offense had something to do with dishonor to the dead and a lot to do with the notion of perversion. Both are increasingly lost to contemporary society. In a way difficult to define, promiscuous debate has something to do with that loss. Debate dignifies the daft and the dirty by giving them the same attention as things time has established as right, just, sensible.
This happens partly too because of the terms of the debate. What counts is harm or benefit shown to be done to others. And next to nothing else counts. Cases where the harm is difficult to show, such as offensiveness especially to public decency, won’t do well in this utilitarian and consequentialist debate. And cases that depend on absolute ideas of virtue, of something being wrong whether or not it does harm, won’t be admissible at all. Tradition is denied entry to this court. The judges have no time for the prejudices worked out by experienced societies over thousands of years. Prejudice is a dirty word.
The modern debate allows only two verdicts. Either the behavior is accepted, in which case it has to be thoroughly accepted. Or it isn’t. So homosexuality, for instance, cannot be grudgingly tolerated. Once it is legal, it has to be considered as good as heterosexuality. The same goes for the “voluntary” single family. Discriminate totally or not at all. There’s no room in this society for a little discrimination, a spot of shame or embarrassment. The old society, in contrast, had a sophisticated shading of ideas in which some were mainstream, some beyond the pale, and yet others in the shadows. Oscar Wilde’s friend Lord Alfred Douglas wrote of the love that dare not speak its name. Even in the nineteenth century that was not such a harsh thing. Indeed Wilde and Douglas spent much of their time nattering to anyone who would listen about their supposedly silent love. They did not just want to be left alone. Douglas told Andre Gide what he had wanted when he entered the Savoy with Wilde. “I want everyone to say, ‘There goes Oscar Wilde and his minion.’ ”
THE old society was not static. Ideas and behaviors moved from the illegal to the legal, from providing contempt and ridicule to drawing acclaim, but they did so slowly via stages in the shadows. Indeed, this was the way the old society tested ideas. Dismissing an idea was not the worst thing one could do to it. James Fitzjames Stephen puts the point nicely, commenting on the ballad, “Cursed be the coward that ever he was born / Who did not draw the sword before he blew the horn.” Having to fight for a hearing of one’s idea tests it. Until a man, says Stephen., “has formed opinions for which he is prepared to fight, there is no hardship in his being compelled by social intolerance to keep them to himself and to those who sympathize with them.” The replacement of prejudice, measured approval, and degrees of intolerance by simplistic, “prove the damage done” debate and the total rights that go with it is responsible for very grave trends in society. Most grave, it is producing a frivolous society, one that does not know an idea which can contend for serious claim from a trivial one. Then, since many of the ideas now so rapidly and totally admitted to full normality are tied to behavior, we must live with the behavioral consequences. There are now millions of children being brought up without fathers partly because society had no adequate prejudicial defenses against the one parent family. Many of the homosexuals who have died from AIDS were killed, in part, by society’s rush to endorse homosexual behavior as normal. Ideas do indeed have consequences. The last consequence is the most literally grave. One of the strongest defenses against outlandish ideas and behavior was ridicule. Ridicule is not now permitted. And a society that is condemned to take all claims seriously will soon be a society whose eyebrows cannot be raised in disbelieving amusement, whose gaze cannot turn down in scorn, whose mouth cannot laugh. It will have lost its best defense of order the sense of the comic. Do I hear the sound of spades against graves?
The article makes many good points. However, one does not need to accept the writer's suggestion that ridiculing unacceptable social conduct is no longer permitted. At my website, there is some in virtually every article. We make no concessions to the pretensions or pseudo-intellectual newspeak of the Twentieth Century Left, and we intend to step up the attack in this new Century.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
I think the author was referring to the society at large and not the realm of the web where you can publish your ideas with very little backlash.
In a business, educational, political or other social setting if you disparage unacceptable social conduct you will most likely have your head handed to you.
Remember Murphy Brown and Dan Qualye? And that wasn't even ridicule.
If you mean that some jerk may take a swing at me, I suppose I should be careful--although I haven't been so yet. Still, one must admit that the aging process doesn't make it too wise to take on people more than 20 years younger than one finds oneself. But the only question, really, is whether to fight or prosecute for assault. I have no intention to pretend that I find certain conduct acceptable, and will continue to make politically uncorrect jokes, whenever they help make my point.
On the other hand, if you are suggesting that there is on this planet a "Liberal," who can take me on in a debate, and not end by my handing him, his head, I can only say that I have yet to meet such. A former Governor of Ohio used to be able to debate me on fairly even terms for 45 minutes. After that the pressure started to get to him.
I studied the thought processes of the modern "Liberal," in my teens, and came to a clear understanding of just how loosely they are wrapped. They do not start out, as we do, trying to determine something real and true, on which to structure the formulation of an opinion. From the smartest to the dumbest of the breed, it is all wishes for horses, and flying pigs for ideas--in short the wish list of neurotics who are into major denial of the realities on which human existence is based.
If this taunting tone prompts some lurking Lefty to try his luck in a little typed debate, I just might demonstrate the points. But again, thanks for posting the enjoyable background article.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
On the other hand, if you are suggesting that there is on this planet a "Liberal," who can take me on in a debate, and not end by my handing him, his head, I can only say that I have yet to meet such
I meant neither of those.
Back to the example of VP Quayle and the Murphy Brown incident.
It is demonstrably superior to raise children in a loving two parent heterosexual home.
Most anyone asserting this to the exclusion of other "arrangements" will be shouted down by hordes of unthinking moral relativists that don't have the common sense of a street dog. A good example of this Dr. Laura Schlessinger and the homosexual activists that forced her off of TV.
These people will not pause to debate you. They will bring the intellectual equivalent of torches and pitchforks and carry you out naked and beat you to death (metaphorically speaking of course). They are a senseless and emotionally violent mob that, in many cases, cannot be reasoned with.
Yes, it certainly is. And not only for the immediate benefit of the kids and parents. It is in strong reproducing families that Society achieves its continuum, the ongoing character of its institutions. Without a sense of the progression of generations, within the family, in a society composed of such families, most--if not all--of the progress achieved within each generation (both material and other), is likely to be lost, as the incentive to build and retain for the purpose of passing on, is lost.
But I know I am preaching to the choir.
You are right about the lynch mob psychology. But with a little concerted attack--particularly one directed by those who understand how to provoke just the reaction you describe and then counter-punch it; a great deal could be done to teach the pervert bullies a lesson. Quayle was a little naive. He should have hit back, and let the chips fall where they might. He would have saved his political career, in my opinion.
Dr. Laura has not really been whipped. The organized perverts had the clout to get her thrown off of TV, but the battle isn't really over. Indeed, it really needs to be persisted in. The visual media is doing our society a lot of damage; but it is not one sided. A lot of people who were never ideological in their lives, are ready to wretch at the steady diet of homosexual glamorization. If the President would stop apologizing for opposing the Homosexual agenda, and use the "Bully Pulpit," he could quickly neutralize at least the last couple of years of propaganda. (No, I know the Leftists in the media would start howling like stuck pigs. But with the right sort of gentle quips, and references to the wholesome images that most people still secretly long for, most people will embrace normal sexuality over organized deviancy.)
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
Race is a morally neutral or benign characteristic. Sexual behavior has a moral component to it. If you cannot discern the difference between interracial marriage and homosexual marriage or you think they are moral equivalents then have problems. Thinking ability problems.
And as for slavery, the Christians (which I can only assume you regard as troglodytes) were at the forefront of the abolitionist movement.
I don't think the gentle quips will get the amount of air time (if any at all) that the attacks by the "stuck pigs" will get.
True, the alternative media, i.e. talk radio, the web, some of Fox News, will give you som air time. But the waves of hysterical leftist drivel or thoughtless libertine rationalizations will eventually wash over the "gentle quips" like a red tide in which nothing can live for very long.
I know this sounds pessimistic (I'd like to think realistic) but we are outnumbered. The majority of the population are as Orwell's Smith said to his lover, "...a rebel from the waist down" Ultimately I hope you are right and I am wrong and the gentle quips can win.
True. Now that we know that how can you tell which ones were right?
In Moral Relativity World....it is impossible to tell. The one with the most guns or gold will get to impose his will.
In the sane world, you appeal to absolute truth and/or logical interpretation of the Bible to surmise that the slavery supporting Christians are wrong.
The stuck pig reaction, we agree, is predictable. The "gentle quips," is to avoid being lumped with the Rev. Phelps, or is that the name of the Minister who goes so far out of his way to inject hate into the debate, almost to appear as an agent provacateur for the benefit of those whom he attacks? When the stuck pig reaction sets in, a less gentle response would be in order to the "stuck pigs."
The media are as biased as you indicate, but in that bias, they are so full of their own presumptions and prejudices, that they can be expected both to overreact and also to lead with their chins in the smug assumption that they can expose "bigotry," etc.. That leads to additional opportunities to make points. I see confrontations of this sort as the way to turn the tide. I have many personal experiences with using the media bias against the Left.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
You cited something the other day, which frankly caused me a touch of sadness. When the media went after Quayle over the comment on their glamorizing bastardhood--my nasty term--we (Conservatives) did not take up the gauntlet, generally. That was actually an important issue--if not for Quayle's short lived campaign, certainly for the American future. We should have made a lot more noise on that one--maybe, just maybe reaching a few folk, still capable of rational analysis.
On the subject you raise--the poor quality of some call ins--there is probably a lot of material being posted at Free Republic, which is being relatively wasted, as preaching to the Choir, which could improve the quality of such call ins. (Don't misunderstand--for all the preaching to the Choir--we do a lot of good here, sharpening our wits, and also reaching a lot of lurkers surfing by. It is just important that we do not confine our outspokenness to this venue.)
Bill
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