Dead issues - social values

National Review, Jan 29, 1996 by Digby Anderson

This article is a version of Mr. Anderson's chapter on Ridicule in This Will Hurt: The Restoration of Virtue and Civic Order, just out from National Review Books.

Necrophilia is the erotic attraction to corpses. There is no exclusivity here. The corpse may be old or young, male or female, human or animal, stranger or relative, one's own recently departed mother or a sheep taken at random from the abattoir. Various aspects of necrophilia are illegal and, insofar as it is mentioned at all, it is, to my limited knowledge, socially disapproved of. Or, if you prefer, we could say that necrophiliacs are politically repressed and socially discriminated against, their rights to free sexual expression systematically denied.

Suppose you wanted to champion the oppressed necrophiliac -- not only to free him from legal shackles but to have his sexual identity and lifestyle considered normal, as normal as that of a "normal" married couple -- how might you go about your campaign? You might call a philosopher. He would explain that absolute moral standards were not the issue in this multicultural society. Today we are enlightened enough to tolerate and even affirm others' lifestyles provided they do not harm third parties. He could easily show that necrophilia harms no one in the usual and mortal use of that term. Not a single complaint has ever been made by the object of a necrophiliac's attentions. Would that we could say the same about violence within traditional marriage! And necrophilia is essentially a private affair. Much quoting of John Stuart Mill would take place. Our philosopher might recognize that necrophilia is thought outlandish but point out that if we persecute every idea thought outlandish we will end as a very repressive society. He might then catalogue all the items once thought outlandish which are now understood to be perfectly normal.

A classical liberal economist could easily be found to talk impressively about costs imposed on others, externalities, private and public goods, and Pareto optimality. He would reach a conclusion similar to the philosopher's: it hurts no one. A psychoanalyst would go further and point out that necrophiliacs were more likely to hurt others if their desires were repressed than if they were indulged. Indeed those desires might be transferred to live objects. Necrophiliacs should be not only allowed to practice but encouraged to talk about their practices. Assorted necrophiliac activists would then sift through history to find all sorts of generals, kings, bishops, and scientists who were necrophiliacs or would have been had they not lived in societies irrationally prejudiced against necrophilia. They would produce a survey which showed that 27 percent of the American population had had or had fantasized a necrophiliac episode, and that these included taxpayers and men who had fought for their country. The final card to win the game would be a statement by a leading sculptor or novelist that the denial of necrophilia was a denial of artistic and creative freedom.

The idea of a campaign to promote necrophilia is not as fantastic, if I may use that word, as it might seem. Currently there is a case before the European Court concerning the "rights" of sado-masochists to hurt each other in various perverted ways.

More generally, Western societies have seen a series of behaviors, once thought evil, perverse, or just plain barmy, solemnly argued for as normal and very quickly accepted as such. Take the case of illegitimacy, once thought an occasion for shame; or that of vegetarianism, once thought, for instance by Orwell, to be the sure sign of a crank; or that of homosexuality. All these have become accepted, at least officially, as being normal, of equivalent worth to the bearing of children in wedlock, traditional food, and heterosexuality. And the journey from being thought outlandish to being affirmed as normal is taking less and less time. And there are others. Consider the way counseling, a practice almost entirely without tested scientific basis, now sits in our hospitals alongside sophisticated surgery and elaborately tested pharmaceuticals; or the way a society steeped in the sophisticated wisdom of Christianity and Judaism has so easily fallen for New Age nonsense and Mother Earth sorcery.

It is important to remember that these behaviors were once not just disapproved of. They were seen as obviously wrong or barmy, things to be dismissed "out of hand," without dis- cussion, as ridiculous, to be laughed at. This suggests questions. Is there anything that modern society is capable of dismissing out of hand? Is it condemned to considering all behaviors and views solemnly, weighing the pros and cons? Is ridicule out? And is there something about the way modern society solemnly reviews what was once thought perverted and barmy that makes it very likely that it will accord that behavior normal status? Because if all is to be normal then nothing will be, and all will be chaos.

The road to loss of judgment and proportion looks at first so rational. Modern society is scientific and democratic, and so it believes in debate. But it has deified debate. The old society believed in debate, but not about everything. It knew in its bones that necrophilia was deeply disgusting. The feeling of disgust and offense had something to do with dishonor to the dead and a lot to do with the notion of perversion. Both are increasingly lost to contemporary society. In a way difficult to define, promiscuous debate has something to do with that loss. Debate dignifies the daft and the dirty by giving them the same attention as things time has established as right, just, sensible.