Mag - The Police Bend the Knee

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