I couldn’t get to sleep the other night for worrying about the future of liberalism. So I got up and put the telly on. Maybe there would be something soothing on, to help me forget my worries. There was a show on Channel 4 called My First Threesome. The voiceover explained that lockdown had led many of us to be more sexually adventurous, and even to explore ‘what is for many of us the ultimate fantasy’.
Before we met some enthusiastic adventurers, a brief historical segment explained that many wise ancient cultures saw sex with more than one person as a perfectly natural desire. ‘Then for centuries religion and shame pushed it to the realm of fantasy.’ Then we briefly heard form a couple of bouncy participants, one of whom cheerily said that sex with two people was doubly pleasurable; another said that the orgasm he had in a threesome exceeded any other he had ever had. Then I turned it off.
In our culture we have to be very careful not to offend each other. No, hang on, that’s not quite right. In our culture we have to be very careful not to offend minorities of any sort. Offending the majority is assumed to be a sort of victimless crime.
Do I not have the right to be protected from this sort of thing, just as a homosexual has the right to be protected from negative views of his sexuality? For it is part of my identity that I am offended by a hedonistic view of sex. Not my identity as a Christian, as it doesn’t feel especially religious. It offends me as a human, as I understand humanity. But that is not an ‘identity’ that is deemed worthy of respect. According to the orthodoxy, that just makes me a prudish conservative type.
Or maybe it is a mistake for me to try to get on to the ‘offended victim’ bandwagon. Yes, I found the Channel 4 programme ‘offensive’ – but am I threatened by it, in the same sort of way that a homosexual claims to be threatened by a homophobic programme? No, I suppose not. But maybe there is another sort of offensiveness. In Mary Whitehouse’s day such a programme was seen as ‘offensive’, meaning it threatened the moral fabric of society. The moral fabric of society! That was a code for the traditional moral prejudices of the majority, wasn’t it?
So ‘offensive’ has changed its meaning. It is now only seen as a valid term when the victims belong to a particular minority. The notion of a programme being objectively offensive, threatening to the public realm – that has gone.
I exaggerate slightly, because there is one way in which the notion of objective offensiveness lives on. If that programme was broadcast at seven o’clock rather than eleven, it would be seen as objectively damaging to the fabric of society, on account of its ‘inappropriate’ content.
So the old meaning of ‘offensive’ – damaging to society in general – now lives on, or limps on, within another term, ‘inappropriate’.
But this is not enough. We must revive the notion of objective moral offence, irrespective of age. It is a weird form of cowardice to say that anything goes unless it offends this or that minority. In fact it is form of social suicide, a way of saying that there is no common moral life.
