Opinion | A Liberal's Admonishment to Liberals

The Righteousness Mob (No.Four of a Series)

Manfred Wolf

   Some of my readers have been taking issue with my series of columns on the subject of our present-day mania for “calling people out.” They think I am indirectly defending the #MeToo wrongdoers, or that I am, as someone nicely quoted, “straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.” Others view me as having slid over to the Dark Side; in their eyes I might as well be wearing a MAGA hat.
My claim that these fashionable notions emanated from the Left proved especially offensive. How could I attribute totalitarian gestures to the Left, to those who were progressives and championed social justice? My argument that in our time the left sets the cultural tone and shapes cultural trends — and is frequently able to translate culture into law — went nowhere.
I was  also told that my term ‘puritanism’ seems inappropriate in our time when so many different kinds of sexual behavior are not only permitted but celebrated, as indeed they are.
So why do I call our present ways puritanical? Because our “purifying” zeal is endless, and we take great joy in restricting, judging, and punishing. I don’t mean to suggest that attacks against women are ever permissible, nor do I advocate sex with children or adolescents; but calling people out for speaking suggestively, or for leering, or for putting a hand on a female shoulder, as Joe Biden or Al Franken have been accused of doing, is ludicrous and, yes, puritanical. All puritanical ages seek prudishly to root out pleasure, frivolity or any display they don’t approve of.
In Victorian times, women were not supposed to show any skin, nor was sex outside marriage ever condoned. Homosexuality was, of course, forbidden. But the age of consent was not as seriously demarcated as it is now, and Victorian children often went oddly unprotected. It is said that on many a night little girls lodged innocently at middle-aged Lewis Carroll’s house, while few eyebrows were raised at the Alice in Wonderland author’s photographs of young nude girls.
For that matter, the age of consent is not stable even in modern times, as my recent characterization of the courtship of French President Macron demonstrated.
Beyond the fluidity of all these shifting prohibitions, note also that they mark in each case the most recent face of a “progressive” measure. In Victorian times women were sheltered as “protection” from male rapaciousness, much as they are in strict Islamic societies now. Progress was measured by how confined the woman was. The ostensible aim of many restrictive measures is to advance women’s well-being by shielding them. So it was thought that sexual taboos, codes and prohibitions served to advance the cause of civilized men and women, and of civilization itself, though in fact it merely ensured the woman’s captivity.
The mistake that most people make is to see our recent strictures as definitive, as final — as the ultimate state to which progress has led. But they are not The Last Word. They are merely the last words that will be said until they are replaced by other last words.