Let us look at the matter scientifically. The best evidence must lead us to conclude that we are one remote and marginal consequence of a cosmic explosion. Out of this long cataclysm arose certain elements and atmospheres, which in combination and over time produced, shall we say, New York City, with all it embraces and implies. Well, all right. Imagine accident upon coincidence upon freak, heightened by mysterious phenomena of order and replication, and there you have it. That natural process should have produced complicated animals who exist in vast aggregations is conceivable. But, I submit, that they should be suited to living happily — in vast aggregations or in farming villages or as hermits on the tops of mountains — is a stroke of thinking so remarkable in a supposedly nontheological context that it takes my breath away. Scientifically speaking, we are weird, soft, bigheaded things because we adapted to the mutable world by keeping a great many options open. Biologically speaking, we are without loyalties, as ready to claim an isthmus as a steppe. In our bodies we are utterly more ancient than Hittites and Scythians, survivors of the last swarm of locusts, nerved for the next glaciation. We have left how many cities standing empty? That any condition of life should be natural and satisfactory to us is an idea obviously at odds with our nature as a species, and as clearly at odds with our history. Would not mass contentment be maladaptive? Yet so much of modern life has been taken up with this nightmare project of fitting people to society, in extreme cases hewing and lopping away whole classes and categories. Humankind has adopted and discarded civilization after civilization and remained itself. We have done the worst harm we have ever suffered by acting as if society can or should be stable and fixed, and humankind transformed by whatever means to assure that it will be.
I am making this argument in terms not natural to me. My heart is with the Puritans. I would never suggest that history, whatever that is, should be left to take its natural course, whatever that is. I accept what Jonathan Edwards might have called the “arbitrary constitution” of behests and obligations. I draw conclusions from the fact that we cannot reason our way to a code of behavior that is consistent with our survival, not to mention our dignity or our self-love. But, even in the terms of this argument, what could have been more brutal than these schemes to create happy and virtuous societies? Might we not all have been kinder and saner if we had said that discontent is our natural condition, that we are the Ishmael of species, that, while we belong in the world, we have no place in the world? And that this is true not because something went wrong, but because of the peculiar terms of our rescue from extinction? Our angst and our anomie have meant to us that society has gone wrong, which means that other people have harmed us. The corollary of this notion, that our unhappiness is caused by society, is that society can make us happy, or remove the conditions that prevent us from being happy. And if the obstacle to collective happiness is believed to be other people, terrible things seem justified.
When the woman in the episode I described rebuked and embarrassed someone for using the wrong language, she was acting on an assumption that is now very common and respectable, which is that vice, shall we call it, is perpetuated in society in words, images, narratives, and so on; that when these things are weeded out vice is attacked; that where they still appear vice is flourishing. The cruelest words and the most disturbing images have normally been discountenanced in this society, and have been cherished by those who love forbidden things, just as they are now. Formerly the society was more tolerant of racial slurs and vastly less tolerant of depictions of violence, especially against women. It was also more racist and less violent. I cannot speculate which is cause and which effect, or even if it is meaningful to describe the phenomena in those terms. In any case, the “vice” in this instance was on the order of saying Mohammedan for Muslim, Oriental for Asian. Neither of the forbidden words has a hint of aspersion in it. They are simply associated with old attitudes, which they are taken to contain and reveal. No matter that the man who misspoke is known to be a very generous-spirited man, who would never intend an aspersion against anyone. Social methods that have been used to restrict the expression of obscenity or aggression — shaming, for example — are now slurring over to control many other forms of language (and therefore, on the short-blanket principle that is always a factor in moral progress, no longer restrict obscenity and aggression). This is done on the grounds that certain words are socially destructive, as indeed in varying degrees and circumstances they may sometimes be. This would be no fit subject for an analysis of priggishness if it did not have at least one foot in safe moral territory.
But, needless to say, there are problems. One is in the binary assumption that ideas equal words and that words carry ideas in them. If the relationship between words and ideas were indeed that close, no one would be paid for writing. Words would not be transformed by use. New ideas would depend on new coinages. This is thinking of the kind I call Stalinist, because it derives moral confidence and authority from its incredible simplicity. Now, if anything in the world is complex, language is complex. But the point is not really to characterize language but to characterize society by implying that certain things are true about language. A great mythic world rests on the back of this small conceptual turtle.
Very early on I proposed that priggishness is so available to us, and that where we do not subscribe to it we are nevertheless so helpless against it, because we cherish a myth of conversion in which we throw off the character our society gives us and put on a new one in all ways vastly superior. Normally this great change is achieved by education, enhanced by travel, refined by reading certain publications, manifested in the approved array of scruples and concerns, observed ritually in the drinking of water, the eating of fish, the driving of Volvos, and otherwise. (I think to myself, if we must be so very imitative, why can we never imitate a grace or an elegance? But that is outside the range of the present discussion. Though I do note that priggishness has never shown any aptitude for such things, any more than elegance or grace have claimed an affinity with priggishness.) Among us salvation is proved by a certain fluency of disparagement and disavowal. The prig in us could not enjoy all this, or believe in it, if the distinctions made were only economic and social. They must also, first of all, be moral.
Here I will divulge a bitter thought. I will say, by way of preparation, that much of the behavior I observe in these people looks like the operations of simple fashion. Phrases and sensitivities change continuously, perhaps as a function of evolving consciousness, perhaps as a feature of intense and active peer group identification. Clearly, as economic subset, our zealots experience the same frissons of consumer optimism we all do, though they might be focused on fetish bears rather than video cameras, one desideratum supplanting another in the ordinary way. Traffic in moral relics is an ancient practice, and while it is not harmless, neither is much else.
But I think there might be another impetus behind all this mutation. I think because our zealots subscribe to the conversion myth, they can only experience virtuousness as difference. They do not really want to enlist or persuade — they want to maintain difference. I am not the first to note their contempt for the art of suasion. Certainly they are not open to other points of view. If it is true that the shaping impulse behind all this stylized language and all this pietistic behavior is the desire to maintain social distinctions, then the moral high ground that in other generations was held by actual reformers, activists, and organizers trying to provoke debate and build consensus, is now held by people with no such intentions, no notion of what progress would be, no impulse to test their ideas against public reaction as people do who want to accomplish reform. It is my bitter thought that they may have made a fetish of responsibility, a fetish of concern, of criticism, of indignation.