Por Spectator,
People poison themselves through consuming stuff that harms
them. They also poison the world, by spreading venomous thought,
venomous entertainment, and venomous waste. It is a strange feature
of our societies that governments increasingly seek to control the
first kind of poison, which threatens only the individual, while
largely ignoring the second kind, which threatens us all. The
reason for this lies in a deep disorder within democracies—namely
the fear of moralizing, which leads legislators to order us about
for the good of each of us, but never for the good of all.
We go a little way to understanding the matter if we consider
the three great public poisons of our time, what they are doing to
us, and why we find it so difficult to take action against them:
political correctness, pornography, and plastic. The first poisons
thought, the second poisons love, and the third poisons the world.
Between them they put in question whether human life as we know it
will survive, and whether it ought to survive, given what it will
look like when the poisons have done their work.
Political correctness means soft censorship—censorship with
penalties soft enough to be spread across us all. When people
burned each other at the stake for uttering forbidden thoughts,
they were also careful to draw a precise distinction between the
forbidden and the permitted, so as to confine the danger. When the
only penalty for uttering forbidden thoughts is to lose your job as
a journalist, or your promotion in the academy, then the task of
defining the forbidden area becomes less urgent. Moreover, for that
very reason, the poison spreads rapidly through society, so that
there is no longer any easy way to avoid it. When “homophobia” or
“Islamophobia” are mere name-calling, without clear legal
consequences for the victim, they can be used indiscriminately to
ruin the career of whosoever might have stumbled, by whatever
accident of fate, into the target area. When words become deeds,
and thoughts are judged purely by their expression, and not by the
arguments advanced in their favor, then there is no clear way of
debating the issues of the day, however vital they might be. A
universal caution invades the intellectual life; people mince their
words, sacrifice style and grace for the clumsy armor of
“inclusive” syntax, avoid all the areas where orthodoxies have
taken root—sex, race, gender, religion, patriotism—and beat around
bushes in which nothing hides.
It is thanks to political correctness that the academy has been
overwhelmed by pseudo-scholarship. It is thanks to political
correctness that the British government has adopted gay marriage as
its policy, even though it never proposed this to the electorate.
It is thanks to political correctness that a hospital worker can,
in Britain, leave a patient unattended in order to say
salat, but not perform his or her hospital duties while
wearing a cross. In a hundred little ways our traditional forms of
life are being censored out of existence. Every now and then there
is a show trial conducted in order to remind the people of this, as
when Larry Summers was driven from his position at Harvard for
having dared to suggest that the brains of women are differently
organized from the brains of men.
The poison of pornography has something in common with the
poison of political correctness, namely that it is not noticed as a
poison by those who promote it. The astonishing thing, indeed, is
that American opinion formers have to be persuaded of the
damage that pornography is inflicting. They have to be confronted
with the overwhelming body of research, well known to the
psychological community and in any case no more than common sense,
which shows that porn is addictive, destructive of sexual
confidence, undermining of sexual relations, and promoting of an
entirely abusive and objectified view of women in particular and
human beings in general. Not only is porn driving all romance and
hesitation from the expression of sexual desire; it is
reconfiguring that desire, so that it is no longer a free gift
between persons but a form of enslavement.
It is right to see porn as a poison, because its effects cannot
be confined. The addiction is only the smallest part of it. Far
worse is the destruction inflicted on the emotional life and on the
capacity to love. A difficult discipline, on which the future of
society depends, and to which previous generations devoted all that
was best in their nature, is being placed beyond the reach of young
people. And as a result their emotional lives are increasingly
disordered. (If you don’t believe this, then you must read the
definitive account in James Stoner and Donna Hughes, The Social
Costs of Pornography, Princeton, Witherspoon Institute,
2010.)
IS IT STEPPING FROM the sublime to the ridiculous to extend my
argument to plastic? Some would say so. But just look at what
plastic is doing to us. Go into any supermarket or drug store
today, and you will see products almost entirely wrapped in
non-biodegradable cellophane or polythene, which composes some 15
percent of the weight of the goods that leave the store. Most of
this will be conveyed to a landfill. But not all of it. Even if
only 0.01 percent escapes into the environment, to be blown by the
wind, washed into rivers, buried in undergrowth, and eventually
conveyed to the ocean, the effect over a matter of a few years is
devastating—to wildlife, to the oceans, to the look of the
landscape, and to the beauty of human habitations. You can see what
I mean if you look from a railway train at those unvisited plots
alongside the track. Bottles and wrappings from the passing
traffic, few and far between compared with the trash that is
collected from each train, have nevertheless accumulated to such an
extent that for many miles, and especially through the towns, it is
all but impossible to look from the window without a feeling of
alarm and disgust. But that sight is a premonition of what the
whole world may soon be like. We are told that a platform of
plastic waste the size of Texas now swirls in the Pacific Ocean,
and all across the world polythene bags drift in the trees, snag in
the rivers, and end in the stomachs of animals and birds.
Why mention this in the same breath as the other two P’s?
Because it tells us how to look for a remedy. Non-degradable
plastic wrappings are unnecessary. They could be forbidden tomorrow
and we would survive. Thanks to the agitation over climate change,
environmentalists expend their energies on problems that cannot
easily be solved, instead of on this one, which can. Forbid these
wrappings in one country and the solution will spread to all other
countries that are connected to it by trade. To forbid this poison
would not be oppressive: it would not be forbidding us from taking
pleasures that are meaningful to us, or from leading lives that we
really want. Of course, I am not in favor of governments bossing us
about. But forbidding this particular poison is not stopping a
reasonable pleasure; it is merely compelling us—you, me, and the
storeowner—to internalize our costs, and not to pass them on to
future people.
HAVING PRODUCED a legal antidote to one of the poisons, why not
extend the solution further? It was until recently regarded as
wholly within the bounds of legitimate law to forbid the production
and propagation of pornography. This changed only because wily
lawyers were able to hoodwink judges into protecting pornography as
“free speech” under the First Amendment. But it is neither free nor
speech: it is a form of visual slavery, in which those who watch
are enslaved by the sight of others similarly enslaved. Why not
forbid it? What exactly would be lost?
But then what about political correctness? The contrast with the
other two poisons reminds us that nothing is harder to overcome
than the poisoning of thought. Where is the antidote, when the
mental space in which it could grow has been invaded and
sterilized? I have wracked my brains about this for quite some
time, and come up with the following suggestion: we cannot forbid
political correctness, since that would be simply reproducing the
disease. But we can ridicule it. We can, by a collaborative effort,
go on using language as we should, go on making remarks and
expressing thoughts ruled offensive by the censors, and go on
showing contempt for their censorious ways.
It seems to me that this is the only available antidote. It will
work only if we look out for the people to ridicule and make effect
arguments against them, and look out equally for the victims and
offer them our support. I don’t see this happening to any great
extent in America, and it is not happening at all in Europe. But
surely it is worth a try? And maybe the way to begin is to fight
those other two poisons that I mentioned. By doing so, we might
persuade the world that we are serious about the most dangerous
poison of all, the poison that prevents us from thinking.
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