“If men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they will be governed by the ten thousand commandments.” So said GK Chesterton, articulating in a memorable way the truth that a society made up of those who will not govern their own moral behaviour will sooner or later become less free, as the government resorts to ever more coercion and regulation to minimise the consequences of unrestrained human sinfulness.
I think of this aphorism often nowadays as our authorities attempt, with little success, to use the law to contain forms of bad behaviour which, until very recently, were widely understood to be the preserve of manners and morals, transmitted organically through non-political social institutions like the family, churches, youth organisations and so on.
A couple of months back, for example, Transport For London began putting posters up on the Underground and buses reminding men that “intrusive staring” was unacceptable and might be reported to the police as a form of sexual harassment. In April a senior British Transport Police officer reiterated that they would prosecute people suspected of such behaviour. More recently posters have appeared, targeted at men, insisting that they refuse to tolerate their friends’ sexist and misogynist jokes on the grounds that such jokes are the first steps on the road to committing sexual assault or violence against women.
Such initiatives are clearly well-meaning. But the fact that they need to happen at all shows the steep cost of our endless war against limits and constraints on behaviour, and our increasing reliance on the pliable and woolly concept of “consent” as the only benchmark for morality.
In the bad old days of repression (so-called), the public sphere was largely kept free of sexually explicit behaviour and references. Reticence and modesty regarding sex, and indeed most personal matters, were considered the order of the day. This was rooted, of course, in Britain’s long Christian history. It undoubtedly had disadvantages, but it also meant that in public you were unlikely to be confronted with sexual imagery and sexualised behaviour. I don’t mean that what we’d now call sexual harassment or intrusive staring were unknown, but rather that they were unusual and to many people literally unthinkable because of the social and legal norms in place.
Now we think we know better. We have what can feel like an almost pathological openness about every aspect of people’s personal lives, and reservations about a sexualised public sphere are regarded as old-fashioned and puritanical. This leads, however, to a chaotic and confusing situation for many people. We are enjoined to be open about sex; pornography is widely available; highly explicit sex scenes can be shown on TV and films, and huge billboards can feature people in revealing underwear, but personal interactions are governed by very strict rules.
Approached in a rationalistic way, this is defensible. It is all about personal choice and freedom, modern people would say. But this is astonishingly naïve. It does not suit human nature as it really exists. The Christian anthropology understands that appetites, once aroused and indulged, are hard to control, and that we cannot compartmentalise them so easily. We realise that there is a fundamental contradiction in wanting a public life that is as relaxed as possible about all forms of sexual display, and where chivalry is ridiculed and looked down upon, but also one where men are enjoined to behave towards women in public as if it were still 1952. It is not so very easy to have good things when the religious and social norms that underpinned them have been kicked away.
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