Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Woe Betide That Guy

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

So let us talk about the care and feeding of the abnormal, and begin with some poetry. Yeats gave us some of the best lines composed in the 20th century.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

The problem is not that we have seen various individuals who needed to be constrained by societal norms — for we have always had people like that — but rather that our entire society needs to be constrained by societal norms. Now what? This is what it looks like when a center cannot hold, and is in the process of ceasing to be a center. We have always had individual norms that collided with societal norms, but usually societal norms were present in order to take the collision.

Building a new normal takes a lot of work.

Shortly after mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, we soon discover that there must be a center. This means that anarchy, sexual anarchy included, is always a transitional move. It is a tactic. It is the old center that cannot hold. The new center intends to hold quite well, thank you, just as soon as they get a grip. You can take that in both ways if you like.

The demand for absolute tolerance is a transitional move, designed and intended to break down the old norms. The demand for absolute tolerance does not and cannot include sacrilege toward the new norms. This is why the devotees of the new tolerance are the most fiercely intolerant people on the planet. They tolerate transgression of the old norms. In fact they positively encourage it, in the name of sacred tolerance. But if someone throws a dead cat at the high altar of their rarefied and holy sensibilities, woe betide that guy, as we say.

This is why the normalizing of the abnormal is simultaneously (and necessarily) the abnormalizing of the normal. If you insist — as you ought — that there is such a thing as normal human sexual behavior, this means that you are identifying some turn-ons as abnormal, as perverted. Since these perversions are now in the process of getting all the ribbons and accolades society can bestow, this means that the only abnormal behavior is to state out loud that you believe there is such a thing as abnormal sexual behavior. But this is what all normality does — it recognizes that which does not belong to it. And so it is that any kind of deviance from the new is greeted with an array of tolerance clubs.

So in this new order of things, an old school heterosexual coupling is going to be fine with everybody. Whatever turns you on. What will be totally not fine is for anybody to engage in a heterosexual act as normal. The missionary position will be fine, in other words, just so long as it is ironic. If it is not ironic, they will get you — not for the position itself but for the hate.

Oh, come on, and for pity’s sake, someone might say at this point. You don’t mean to maintain that the new intolerista regime would penalize normal sexual activity? Surely they wouldn’t take it that far. I take the point but the problem is that for totalitarians their “take-it-too-far” switch is busted. There are a lot of things already that I thought they would have left alone.