Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command

One thing we were taught in Britain as children in the 50s and 60s has long puzzled me – the insistence that before the use of ether to produce general anaesthesia, nothing but alcohol was available to dull the pain of surgery. Yet the same people who told us this would speak in minatory tones about the availability since the 16^th century of laudanum, and its pernicious use in quack pharmacology.

Of course, the truth is that preparations of opium were indeed used to sedate patients, and to dull pain, before the advent of general anaesthesia in the 1840s. Indeed, it’s arguable that the opium poppy is one of nature’s great boons to mankind. Why, then, were our elders and betters so coy about it? The obvious answer is opium’s tendency to addict its users.

And of course that was the ‘problem’ with opium. Not only did it relieve pain, but it gave pleasure, encouraging its continued use after the complaint for which it was originally administered had resolved, and trapping its user in a cycle of increasing dosage and diminishing reward. By the time I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, opiate addiction was well understood to be a grave social problem, and a ‘war on drugs’ was declared, on whose wisdom or efficacy it is not the purpose of this article to dwell. Instead, I want to suggest that the consumption of opium to relieve pain, only for its use to be continued, to the point of addiction, for the procurement of pleasure, may provide an illuminating metaphor for other aspects of human behaviour which have become, at least in the ‘Western’ world, just as vexatious as drug addiction.

At around the same time as the declaration of the ‘war on drugs’, the protest movement was beginning in earnest. Again, it is not the purpose of this article to examine the merits of the causes taken up by the protesters of the 60s. Suffice it to say that many causes which today meet with little or no objection were, when they were advanced in the 60s, deeply counter-cultural, and their espousal was therefore transgressive. The protesters who opposed the Vietnam war, and called for the decriminalisation of homosexuality were opposing, not just centuries-old societal norms, but often the deeply-felt beliefs of their parents. The natural urge of adolescent humans to procure their own independence was given moral force – an unprecedented righteousness that became self-reinforcing, while, like any addictive habit, delivering diminishing rewards.

One by one, age-old attitudes were declared to be unjust, and in many cases were proscribed by legislation. By the turn of the last century, the targets of the 60s protesters had by and large been hit. Race, gender and sexual orientation were no longer permissible grounds for discrimination. Then something strange happened.

“…just as the train appeared to be reaching its desired destination it suddenly picked up steam and went crashing off down the tracks and into the distance.” This is Douglas Murray’s description, in his book ‘The Madness of Crowds’ of the phenomenon we must all have witnessed – the proliferation of ‘rights’, in the name of ‘social justice’, that would until quite recently have seemed perfectly outlandish – what has come to be known as the ‘woke agenda’.

Many theories have been advanced to account for this overshoot. None seems to me to be entirely satisfactory. Missing from them, it seems to me, is the role played in propelling ostensibly sane people in insane directions, of the pleasure given, in and of itself, by transgressive behaviour. Transgression had become fun; a recreational activity to be pursued for its own sake.

They’d rather hae the grievance

One of the effects of this transformation of the 1960s protest movement was to create an ethical link between transgression and personal virtue. The reward of bringing about the removal of a real injustice was always amplified by a frisson of pleasure at having broken the rules, and by doing so, changed them. For many in the ‘protest movement’, it was a frisson too delicious to forgo simply because the causes with which it was most closely associated had now been won. The society they lived in had been purged of its most obvious injustices, but the appetite for righteous transgression persisted. And so came about the phenomenon of performative transgression.

How else do we explain the refusal of climate-change warriors to entertain the use of nuclear energy? Or the tendresse for Islam exhibited by people whose social values in such matters as sex and recreational intoxication are abhorrent to traditional Muslims? How else do we explain ‘Gays for Palestine’? These people must know that they are cheering for a bunch of people who would zealously kill them on account of their sexual orientation, yet they insist that their sympathy lies not with the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, but with the people in whose name that democracy was subjected to a vile, cowardly and gratuitously barbarous attack. How else do we explain Stonewall, which began as a champion of homosexual rights, and, now that those rights have been won, justifies its continued existence as an advocate of ‘trans rights’, apparently oblivious of the contradiction implied in claiming to represent lesbians while simultaneously insisting that they allow the use of their lavatories and changing rooms to men whose claim to have become women rests on no more substantial grounds than their assertion that it is so? What else are we to make of people who shriek about the injustices of slavery, but direct their contumely solely at the legatees of the British Empire, which literally invented the idea that slavery was wrong, while they appear oblivious to the empires that resisted abolition to the last, and in some cases continue successfully to do so?

These inherently self-contradictory views can, I suggest, only be held by people in whom the intrinsic rewards of protesting have become wholly unmoored from the ethical principles in pursuit of which the habit of protest was formed.

Just as the opium addict’s consumption of opium becomes estranged from its original purpose – the relief of pain – and becomes directed at the procurement of pleasure, so the social justice warrior, justice essentially achieved, craves the hit that only activist transgression can give.

This is not to deny the force of other factors in producing the woke madness that presently grips the western world. The careers and livelihoods of countless activists depend on the persistence of the grievances they profess to be intent upon removing. When Communism collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity, its adherents’ amour propre motivated them to look for other causes whose absurdity had yet to be revealed. Countercultural activism has become an industry, with all the self-preserving motivation that any industry develops.

But I do suggest that the success of progressivism in making ridiculous ideas seem not only plausible, but virtuous, owes a key debt to the joy of transgression as a purely recreational activity.