What happens now that people in the future will think is wrong? (II)

This post is about two things. Let's start with the shocker.

Kathleen Stock's reaction? "I still liked it better when you'd discover you'd been cooking a meal neither of you actually liked." Well, quite.

The article from which this passage is taken (read it here) is about the potentially growing reaction against the sex-positivity movement. There is obviously plenty that could be said on that topic, but I won't say it. I have a suspicion that articles in newspapers about young people's sex lives are rather like articles in English newspapers about the French upper-middle classes: they are dispatches from a foreign land, written for readers who have no easy way of checking the facts and who are expecting titillating details of a familiar kind, and so a certain degree of inaccuracy is to be expected as the price for delivering the required product. Just as no one would read an article that said that French men are uxorious to a fault while French women eschew cosmetics and buy all their underwear by mail-order from M&S, no one is interested in hearing that young men and women get along very nicely, thank you, and mostly talk about London property prices. (In this context, it is perhaps worth noting that the author of the article is over 50 and, so far as I can tell from Wikipedia, has been happily married for many years: when she writes about Billie Eilish, she is writing about someone who is a few years older than her son, not about her own milieu.)

Against that background of scepticism, I find myself asking: can this story possibly be true? It has strong urban legend vibes to it. But even if it not strictly true, the fact that it is presented as true in a reasonably reputable newspaper surely indicates something about the society we live in. Moreover, there are various other indications, from numerous sources, of related problems: scarcely a day goes by without seeing someone setting out a plausible complaint about dating apps, dating norms, consent, West Elm Caleb, fertility or just all of it (Mary Harrington on strong form - worth clicking through to the spreadsheet link). So, even leaving aside all of the details in the Guardian article, I think it is fair to say that something about relations between (among?) the sexes has gone awry.

 

The thought that came to me as I read the article was this: from time to time people wonder what we do now that will seem wrong to people in the future and here's an obvious answer.

My next thought was: haven't I written about that before? And indeed I have (hence the title of this post). Here is my first post on the subject, written in 2013. I think the post stands up pretty well in hindsight - have a read and see what you think.

Two points strike me on re-reading my original post now.

(1) I described the exercise of predicting the future's judgment on us as an "intellectual parlour game". I stand by that. But it was not a game I was expecting to be decided in my lifetime: when I came to make my own predictions at the end of the post, I based them on demographic trends and was thinking of what might happen in future generations. But the three predictions I made are looking pretty good less than a decade on.

My first prediction was that "Blasphemy will become regarded as a great moral evil. There will be essentially no constituency for protecting freedom of speech in order to allow blasphemous publications." I wrote that about 18 months before the attack on Charlie Hebdo and almost 9 years before a man was found guilty of posting a "grossly offensive" tweet about the death of Captain Sir Tom Moore (news story here). It's very odd to think that as recently as 2013 there was some doubt about whether there would be a constituency for protecting freedom of speech in the future. Life comes at you fast sometimes.

My second prediction was that there would be further restrictions on abortion. More of a long-term trend there, I suspect. But then again, would anyone in 2013 have predicted Texas' current laws on abortion? Surely the wave of the future, back in 2013, was going the other way? 

And if you don't think that something to do with sexual morality that happens in America can't travel across the Atlantic then go back to that Guardian article, go through each paragraph and see which bits are American and which bits are British - they are entangled as closely as Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion and their snakes. Or just take the phrase "Laurie Penny ... who uses they/them pronouns": the earliest discussion I can find about this kind of use of pronouns on the Guardian's website is from 2015 - and that is in an article whose headline starts "Bruce Jenner ..." (! - better change your archive, Guardian, and pronto!) and proceeds in a manner that now seems rather quaint. Life comes at you very fast sometimes. (Also, see more on abortion below.)

My third prediction was that "decadence" would come to have a meaning outside the context of chocolate cake. Early days on that one, for all that Ross Douthat has been using the word as I predicted.

But in my years online since 2013 I thought I had noticed the word "degenerate" (the noun or adjective, not the verb) acquiring (or re-acquiring) the kind of meaning I had predicted. So I checked with reliable sources, namely Urban Dictionary and Know Your Meme, and this is what I got.

Urban Dictionary:

There you go. That entry comes from 2017: I don't think it would have worked in 2013.

A Know Your Meme search for "degenerate" turns up nothing for the word itself, but this is one of the results:

"It's Aborted TikTok is a viral TikTok video in which a girl goes to a doctor to supposedly find out the gender of her baby and reveals in a sign that "it's a… borted." The video went viral on Twitter in February 2020 and the TikToker revealed that the video was fake and she was going to the doctor because she was severely constipated. ... On February 8th, 2020, Twitter user @iheartmindy reposted TikToker @wren's video that has since been deleted (shown below). @iheartmindy captioned the video by saying, "There’s nothing I can say about this degenerate broad that won’t get me kicked off Twitter." The video gained over 14,000 likes and 3,800 retweets in six days."

Again, an interesting use of "degenerate". Note also the abortion context - what about 'my body, my choice'? Would anyone in 2013 have predicted that a social media network would give thousands of likes to someone criticising as "degenerate" a woman making light of abortion?

All in all, I feel that I was insufficiently bold in my predictions for the future. 

(2) The second point concerns alcohol. 

In my original post I discussed Kwame Anthony Appiah's moves in the intellectual parlour game concerning Prohibition and alcohol. I think it's fair to say that educated Western opinion has turned further against alcohol since 2013 (even ignoring Sue Gray's view that "excessive consumption of alcohol is not appropriate in a professional workplace at any time"). Post Liberal Pete makes the good point that the Right take the same view of alcohol as the Left does of cannabis: laughing off the very real evidence of the harms it causes as Puritan spoil-sportery that should be ignored in favour of a robust and manly libertarian instinct. (Indeed, if there is something small-c conservative in enjoying seeing a drunk person doing something silly, there is something small-l liberal in enjoying seeing a stoned person doing something silly: note that the sitcom Modern Family, widely accepted across the political spectrum, shows us both at different times.) 

I used the word 'manly' advisedly: there is something masculine in the ready acceptance that people will harm themselves and others by ingesting dangerous substances for fun. So I end with a final prediction, again informed by sociological rather than philosophical reasoning: as society becomes increasingly feminised, alcohol will become increasingly stigmatised. 

My feeling is that the full legalisation - in the sense of widespread acceptance - of hard drugs is not going to happen now. The downsides to the use of opiates, crystal meth and so on are just too evident. Marijuana has a certain wind behind it, albeit no more in the UK than it had back in Brian Paddick's day, and so the end state is likely to be an uneasy tolerance of, combined with distaste for, the use of alcohol and soft drugs. They will be ok for young men and the 'cooler' kind of young woman, but they won't be something for proper grown-ups to do. Instead, grown-ups will all be choking each other out of politeness.