For dreamer_marie and patchworkmind
My post of five days ago, about Kate Moss, has generated more reaction than I imagined, especially from two members of my f-list. I am, however, unhappy at some of the features of their debate; and I think it is time - as the starter of the thread, the man-in-charge of this blog, and a person, since age has been mentioned, older than either of you - to call for order in this debate. It has got rather more rancorous than I like. And it has gone on sterile, unprofitable ground, far away from its original point.
I will begin by administering both of you a spanking. If you wanna get mad, I will give you reason to get mad at me, instead of at each other. You have both, especially Marie, trivialized my point. The argument I was making was primarily sociological, although of course it used a great deal of shorthand. Neither of you has noticed that: both of you have taken an individualistic and moralistic view, thinking that I was condemning dumb Kate Moss. I was not. The article was not about her at all; count the references to her as compared to the total body. It was about the reaction of society, especially some wealthy and influential areas, to her entrapment, and the effects that this might have on the bulk of society. Most of the post was to do with the parallel of Hollywood in the thirties.
This is what set off Patchworkmind. He has known the Hollywood environment personally, and it has been a traumatic experience for him; so his attitude is excusable. But his eye seems to be quite simply on the whirlpool itself, and on the small number of people who are, for whatever reason, so obsessed with the whirlpool that they are ready to throw themselves into it. But I was not speaking about the whirlpool at all; if you read the post, you will see that I take for granted the existence of what I called "the extended brothel in Southern California" and that my point was the cumulative effect on society at large when, from the thirties onwards, that small but influential group lost its moral subjection to the views of outside society.
Marie is quite right in pointing out that the direct influence of the "glamorous" world is low, but then Marie shows a dismaying inability to think historically or sociologically. She says: "only a few damaged people are affected by what celebrities do," and that is all for her. Let me point out what is wrong with that statement. It postulates an unchanging state of society, with an inevitable but equally unchanging lunatic fringe some of which can be affected by celebs, while most are not. Her view seems to imply that these things have always happened and will always happen, and that they do nothing to alter the basic facts of social life. In fact, she seems not to consider the notion of societal change at all.
This, of course, makes it impossible to deal with what I had been speaking of: the influence of Hollywood on social change - and a possible parallel movement coming now, in the matter of drugs, from what might be called an extended Hollywood, the whole social sphere now concerned with what can be broadly called glamour. Societies change, they even change very fast, and in nothing more swiftly than in their assumptions. Consider what was thought possible in Russia in 1900, in 1910, and in 1920. Consider the speed with which the French and American revolutions altered assumptions and viewpoints, even before they changed political and economic structures.
I would like to make a study of what I would moral sociology. This would start from the assumption that there is a basic standard of morality that can be reconstructed from all the world's cultures, but from which all the world's cultures differ in important ways; and it would seek out the sociological reasons for those deviations, and the historical path - so long as it can be reconstructed - by which they asserted themselves. How did slavery, almost unknown on the European continent by 1492, become an accepted and defended reality on the two American continents, within two centuries - a reality for which men were not only willing but eager to fight a major war? How did the Roman state, proud of its humane and thoughtful code of law, come to accept and even endorse the commercialized slaughter of human beings for show (gladiator games)? How did pre-Muslim Persia come not only to endorse incest, but to describe it as the noblest and highest kind of marriage, one that destroys demons and evil spirits by its very existence?
The one thing in which Marxism has been both correct and influential has been to draw attention to the way in which social background and self-interest affect the world-views of various social groups. It is not too hard to see that the position of a slave-owner affords a man both a compelling interest and a kind of inner need to find a justification for slavery. However, I believe that the cruder kind of such interpretation is to be modified in two directions. First, we need an assumption that when moral thinking and assumptions deviate, they deviate from something, that is, that there is a standard from which deviation can be measured or at least perceived. Second, we must assume that the need to justify one's life is a psychological need, not one based on material factors. The need to feel in the right is a mental passion, that nothing in a purely materialistic explanation of society justifies; and it is the need to feel in the right, to defend one's own attitudes not only as efficient, useful, or pleasant, but as right, that all these deviations of morality are based. People want to feel that what they normally do is right or justifiable; and where it is not, they assure themselves that morality is either changed or always really supported your side.
This is the sense of habitual entitlement I was speaking of. A Hollywood generation born in, or taken in in their teens to, an environment where divorce was a regular feature of a child's life and orgies a quite acceptable form of social intercourse, would simply not understand the American mentality. You may not realize this, Marie, but until the nineteen-thirties, in America and Europe, divorce was something scandalous, disgraceful - something that could socially ruin husband, wife and co-respondent. A few elite circles in Paris and New York City may have taken a more relaxed attitude, but to the mass of the public, with no distinction between left and right, bourgeoisie and proletariat, divorce was - even where it was legal, which was by no means everywhere - the last and most humiliating disaster. How did we get here from there, in the span of a human lifetime? There are many contributing factors; but indubitably the main factor was the persistency of Hollywood in its own ways.
I am not speaking of the crude one-on-one correspondence you postulate - this or that Hollywood star is on to his fourth divorce, I want to be like him. The two prongs of the assault on common morality were much more devious. One was an aggressive, yet underhanded use of the power of money. When one of the most bankable stars in the world, Erroll Flynn - who stood at least two steps above Mary Astor in degrees of stardom - was accused of statutory rape, Hollywood wealth mobilized. They got him the best lawyer money could buy - and the best private detectives. These detectives quickly found out that the two minors with whom Flynn had had it off were practiced tarts. And it was on their whoredom that the lawyer built his defence.
It should have been a suicidal defence. Whether or not the girls were professionals, they were minors, which meant that under California law, what Flynn had done was rape - statutory rape - a crime to which consent is not a defence. What really happened at that trial was something like an unconscious conspiracy between defence, judge, jury, and to some extent even prosecution. The ostensible grounds on which Flynn was found not guilty was that the girls' evidence had been discredited by their being shown to be whores. But it had not been discredited on the one fundamental point: Flynn had had sex with them. In fact, some of the defence's own questions came perilously close to establishing that very fact. So what that sentence really established was that, contrary to California law, in Hollywood consent was a defence against a charge of statutory rape. What the defence showed was that the girls were tarts and willing, hired partners; and on those grounds Erroll Flynn was absolved under the eyes of all the world.
How had the jury come to make such a decision? Here is where we come to the other prong of the assault on sexual morality: the power of habit. Nobody may have approved of what Flynn did; but by the time of his trial, it fit into the sense of normal things, not only for insular Hollywood people, but for many Americans exposed to daily doses of mass media. When newspapers and radio - and, soon, television - are everlastingly reporting about such things, you lose the sense that they are extraordinary, the so-called *yuk* factor that is one of the most potent and instinctive attendants to the sense of common morality. The idea of something weird and disgusting, which was common to Americans and Europeans in such matters not much more than ten years earlier, was completely alien to this Los Angeles jury. They found it natural that two teen-agers with dreams of being part of the movie industry should prostitute themselves, and that they should be all too happy to fall into the arms of a man of Flynn's fame and supposed influence. (As a matter of fact, Flynn was not a player in any serious manner, but you would hardly expect a couple of sixteen-year-olds to be clear about the fact. Or, for that matter, a contemporary jury. They would not realize for a while yet that, with a few aggressive exceptions with a head for business, actors, even the most famous, were no more than pawns.) And, having come to the conclusion that all parties involved had behaved as one might expect, they decided that there was nothing there to be punished. That is a false conclusion, but a natural one.
This is the effect on society that I was hinting at. It is an effect which has multiplied geometrically from the thirties to the nineties and into our century, until we accept as natural what our fathers, let alone grandfathers, would not mention without disgust except in a medical context. And my point was that the growing mobilization in favour of Kate Moss means that the "Glamorous" classes had come to the sense of entitlement and normalcy with respect to drugs, that their predecessors had reached in the thirties with respect to unregulated sex. There is a real sense of almost innocent incomprehension; to the question "Why are they doing this to her?" it is no longer enough to answer "She has been caught taking class A drugs, is that not enough?" Naomi Campbell is the most recent of the increasingly outspoken number of celebrities that look at you, should you take that view, as if you had just proclaimed that the Moon was square. It will be interesting to see how this affects our society in years to come.
I will begin by administering both of you a spanking. If you wanna get mad, I will give you reason to get mad at me, instead of at each other. You have both, especially Marie, trivialized my point. The argument I was making was primarily sociological, although of course it used a great deal of shorthand. Neither of you has noticed that: both of you have taken an individualistic and moralistic view, thinking that I was condemning dumb Kate Moss. I was not. The article was not about her at all; count the references to her as compared to the total body. It was about the reaction of society, especially some wealthy and influential areas, to her entrapment, and the effects that this might have on the bulk of society. Most of the post was to do with the parallel of Hollywood in the thirties.
This is what set off Patchworkmind. He has known the Hollywood environment personally, and it has been a traumatic experience for him; so his attitude is excusable. But his eye seems to be quite simply on the whirlpool itself, and on the small number of people who are, for whatever reason, so obsessed with the whirlpool that they are ready to throw themselves into it. But I was not speaking about the whirlpool at all; if you read the post, you will see that I take for granted the existence of what I called "the extended brothel in Southern California" and that my point was the cumulative effect on society at large when, from the thirties onwards, that small but influential group lost its moral subjection to the views of outside society.
Marie is quite right in pointing out that the direct influence of the "glamorous" world is low, but then Marie shows a dismaying inability to think historically or sociologically. She says: "only a few damaged people are affected by what celebrities do," and that is all for her. Let me point out what is wrong with that statement. It postulates an unchanging state of society, with an inevitable but equally unchanging lunatic fringe some of which can be affected by celebs, while most are not. Her view seems to imply that these things have always happened and will always happen, and that they do nothing to alter the basic facts of social life. In fact, she seems not to consider the notion of societal change at all.
This, of course, makes it impossible to deal with what I had been speaking of: the influence of Hollywood on social change - and a possible parallel movement coming now, in the matter of drugs, from what might be called an extended Hollywood, the whole social sphere now concerned with what can be broadly called glamour. Societies change, they even change very fast, and in nothing more swiftly than in their assumptions. Consider what was thought possible in Russia in 1900, in 1910, and in 1920. Consider the speed with which the French and American revolutions altered assumptions and viewpoints, even before they changed political and economic structures.
I would like to make a study of what I would moral sociology. This would start from the assumption that there is a basic standard of morality that can be reconstructed from all the world's cultures, but from which all the world's cultures differ in important ways; and it would seek out the sociological reasons for those deviations, and the historical path - so long as it can be reconstructed - by which they asserted themselves. How did slavery, almost unknown on the European continent by 1492, become an accepted and defended reality on the two American continents, within two centuries - a reality for which men were not only willing but eager to fight a major war? How did the Roman state, proud of its humane and thoughtful code of law, come to accept and even endorse the commercialized slaughter of human beings for show (gladiator games)? How did pre-Muslim Persia come not only to endorse incest, but to describe it as the noblest and highest kind of marriage, one that destroys demons and evil spirits by its very existence?
The one thing in which Marxism has been both correct and influential has been to draw attention to the way in which social background and self-interest affect the world-views of various social groups. It is not too hard to see that the position of a slave-owner affords a man both a compelling interest and a kind of inner need to find a justification for slavery. However, I believe that the cruder kind of such interpretation is to be modified in two directions. First, we need an assumption that when moral thinking and assumptions deviate, they deviate from something, that is, that there is a standard from which deviation can be measured or at least perceived. Second, we must assume that the need to justify one's life is a psychological need, not one based on material factors. The need to feel in the right is a mental passion, that nothing in a purely materialistic explanation of society justifies; and it is the need to feel in the right, to defend one's own attitudes not only as efficient, useful, or pleasant, but as right, that all these deviations of morality are based. People want to feel that what they normally do is right or justifiable; and where it is not, they assure themselves that morality is either changed or always really supported your side.
This is the sense of habitual entitlement I was speaking of. A Hollywood generation born in, or taken in in their teens to, an environment where divorce was a regular feature of a child's life and orgies a quite acceptable form of social intercourse, would simply not understand the American mentality. You may not realize this, Marie, but until the nineteen-thirties, in America and Europe, divorce was something scandalous, disgraceful - something that could socially ruin husband, wife and co-respondent. A few elite circles in Paris and New York City may have taken a more relaxed attitude, but to the mass of the public, with no distinction between left and right, bourgeoisie and proletariat, divorce was - even where it was legal, which was by no means everywhere - the last and most humiliating disaster. How did we get here from there, in the span of a human lifetime? There are many contributing factors; but indubitably the main factor was the persistency of Hollywood in its own ways.
I am not speaking of the crude one-on-one correspondence you postulate - this or that Hollywood star is on to his fourth divorce, I want to be like him. The two prongs of the assault on common morality were much more devious. One was an aggressive, yet underhanded use of the power of money. When one of the most bankable stars in the world, Erroll Flynn - who stood at least two steps above Mary Astor in degrees of stardom - was accused of statutory rape, Hollywood wealth mobilized. They got him the best lawyer money could buy - and the best private detectives. These detectives quickly found out that the two minors with whom Flynn had had it off were practiced tarts. And it was on their whoredom that the lawyer built his defence.
It should have been a suicidal defence. Whether or not the girls were professionals, they were minors, which meant that under California law, what Flynn had done was rape - statutory rape - a crime to which consent is not a defence. What really happened at that trial was something like an unconscious conspiracy between defence, judge, jury, and to some extent even prosecution. The ostensible grounds on which Flynn was found not guilty was that the girls' evidence had been discredited by their being shown to be whores. But it had not been discredited on the one fundamental point: Flynn had had sex with them. In fact, some of the defence's own questions came perilously close to establishing that very fact. So what that sentence really established was that, contrary to California law, in Hollywood consent was a defence against a charge of statutory rape. What the defence showed was that the girls were tarts and willing, hired partners; and on those grounds Erroll Flynn was absolved under the eyes of all the world.
How had the jury come to make such a decision? Here is where we come to the other prong of the assault on sexual morality: the power of habit. Nobody may have approved of what Flynn did; but by the time of his trial, it fit into the sense of normal things, not only for insular Hollywood people, but for many Americans exposed to daily doses of mass media. When newspapers and radio - and, soon, television - are everlastingly reporting about such things, you lose the sense that they are extraordinary, the so-called *yuk* factor that is one of the most potent and instinctive attendants to the sense of common morality. The idea of something weird and disgusting, which was common to Americans and Europeans in such matters not much more than ten years earlier, was completely alien to this Los Angeles jury. They found it natural that two teen-agers with dreams of being part of the movie industry should prostitute themselves, and that they should be all too happy to fall into the arms of a man of Flynn's fame and supposed influence. (As a matter of fact, Flynn was not a player in any serious manner, but you would hardly expect a couple of sixteen-year-olds to be clear about the fact. Or, for that matter, a contemporary jury. They would not realize for a while yet that, with a few aggressive exceptions with a head for business, actors, even the most famous, were no more than pawns.) And, having come to the conclusion that all parties involved had behaved as one might expect, they decided that there was nothing there to be punished. That is a false conclusion, but a natural one.
This is the effect on society that I was hinting at. It is an effect which has multiplied geometrically from the thirties to the nineties and into our century, until we accept as natural what our fathers, let alone grandfathers, would not mention without disgust except in a medical context. And my point was that the growing mobilization in favour of Kate Moss means that the "Glamorous" classes had come to the sense of entitlement and normalcy with respect to drugs, that their predecessors had reached in the thirties with respect to unregulated sex. There is a real sense of almost innocent incomprehension; to the question "Why are they doing this to her?" it is no longer enough to answer "She has been caught taking class A drugs, is that not enough?" Naomi Campbell is the most recent of the increasingly outspoken number of celebrities that look at you, should you take that view, as if you had just proclaimed that the Moon was square. It will be interesting to see how this affects our society in years to come.