I often read a book on Southsea Common
as the surroundings are so pleasant. I recently found myself observing from my
park bench a major Pride event which unfolded before me. I noticed that a
specially liveried Police car covered in reassuringly childish cartoons, marked
#Colour in Pride and bearing the Stonewall logo was there in support rather
than in order to police the event. I wondered why the local Police were so
anxious to show support in this way. It seemed a kind of bending
the knee or swearing an oath of fealty to
a modern orthodoxy and the giving up of any qualification regarding the matter.
In a similar way the Liberal Democrats, the Labour Party, the Fire Service and
Unite all had tents on show to demonstrate their solidarity.
Being, as we all are, excruciatingly
aware of the danger of committing the cardinal sin (you may notice me using a
lot of religious terminology here) of homophobia let me declare an interest
here. I am under no illusion that anyone would normally have the remotest
interest in it but I mention it purely to fend off the inevitable
accusation that I have any kind of homophobic axe to grind in these
reflections. I am happily bisexual (I like to describe myself as a
‘functioning’ bisexual). My first marriage broke up because I discovered that
things were less simple than they might have seemed and, for a while, explored
the possibility of it in the local gay community. Having made the necessary
mental adjustments I made the choice to marry a woman and am now very
contentedly married to my second wife.
What intrigued me on the Common was why
our attitude towards gay people is now considered as a kind of absolute litmus
test of goodness which everyone has to pass. My guess is that gay people have
only relatively recently been accepted openly in society and, therefore, fit
the bill as unimpeachable examples of victimhood. They are like living examples
of the man set upon as he made his way from Jerusalem to Jericho in the tale of
the Good Samaritan. By turning out with their car the Bobbies signalled (for
you have to actively contract in) that they are Good Samaritans, “on the right
side of history”, “part of the solution not the problem” (for there is no
middle way), and that they are “on the side of the angels.” Such giving of
testimony must be done in public as a kind of payment of tribute money or of
the wearing of the right coloured sash as the Roundheads and Cavaliers did.
This is because morality is now a public event where one must demonstrate
before the community that one is a ‘hero’ as opposed to a ‘villain’ for such
are the categories into which we now separate people. This represents a
dangerous reversal of what prevailed before in the moral sphere.
One vital thing that distinguishes
humans from other beasts is that the moral sphere is available to us at all.
This is because, to be a moral creature, both self-awareness and freedom of
choice must be present. Once they are the knowledge of good and evil arises
spontaneously and inevitably as a function of what we are. All of this means
that we are all compelled in some manner to contrive a modus operandi or,
in modern parlance, a “solution” or a "fix" with which to
address the moral sphere. In the past Christianity encouraged us to look
inwards and to know that each of us is the worst person we know. It taught us
that, had we been unfortunate enough to live in Nazi Germany, we’d have most
likely been cowards or vicious thugs along with the rest of the Germans. It
taught us to concentrate on the beam in our eye rather than the speck in our
brother’s. It also recommended the way of thinking famously stated by Alexander Solzhenitsyn that sees the line between good and evil
running through all of us as opposed to the convenient division of society into
good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains. Such lessons were salutary, very
practically addressed the moral conundrum and left us well disposed to
confronting the world and our fellow-creatures.
The recent reversal takes the moral
from the private and internal sphere and places it firmly in the public arena.
Internal goodness no longer matters. In a move to Debord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle’, which sees authentic
social life being replaced by representation, it is being seen to be good by
public declarations of one’s correct disposition towards accredited victims
that matters. In the past such open avowals and displays would have been seen
as embarrassing and inappropriate. We might have sympathised or even taken
action but we wouldn't have boasted about our sympathy. Now we are compelled to
wear our allegiances to a quasi-religious orthodoxy (the only one that seems to
matter now) towards gay people like favours on our sleeves.
Dividing the world into publicly
acknowledged heroes and villains, of course, portends many dangers for the
future as such labelling could easily be the basis of demonisations. The real
fear exhibited by the Police of not being seen to publicly display their
allegiances is a measure of how profound the problem has become. We are now
bullied by the bien-pensants into the conformity of wearing
our credentials on our sleeves on pain of moral exile, branding as heretics or
excommunication. An even greater fear might be that, if and when these things
happen, they may be enforced by an on-side Police.
Rejected by TCW as the subject had already been treated twice recently
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