Our public morality has two parts. Part A: people are free to do what they want, even if they do things that most people disapprove of, like getting drunk a lot, or sleeping around. Unless you harm others in some tangible way, you can do what you want. This is good, in my opinion.
Andy and Mandy are scapegoats. We condemn them with special force, in order to reassert the moral code that unites us
Despite this, our culture is not amoral. Part B: we value some forms of life over others. We value people who help others, who are trustworthy, faithful to their spouses – people who are not selfish and greedy.
But the second part of our public creed is difficult to articulate. It sounds preachy to say: ‘People should be community-minded, not selfish’. But it must find expression, somehow. Sometimes it finds positive expression: a paragon of public spiritedness occasionally becomes celebrated for some reason, like Captain Tom during the pandemic, or the Post Office campaigners. But it’s rare that people can unite in admiration – our polarised cultural politics means that there will be widespread sneering at any celebrity or public servant held up for applause. In a way this is good: we have a lot of iconoclastic suspicious bones in our post-Protestant cultural body.
But Part B must find expression. So it finds negative expression. We affirm Part B by attacking high-profile examples of selfishness and greed. Remember: Part A of our public morality means that we have to muffle our opinion about the ordinary adulterer, the ordinary hedonist. All that muffled judgement is powerfully unleashed when a famous person uses their freedom badly, and exemplifies moral turpitude. We suddenly turn intensely moralistic.
In other words, Andy and Mandy are scapegoats. We condemn them with special force, in order to reassert the moral code that unites us. And the force of our righteous anger is extreme because we must ordinarily rein in our disapproval of selfishness and hedonism.
This was especially clear before the latest Epstein papers were released, because until then Andy and Mandy did not seem to have broken any law, but were still treated as utterly reprehensible. Breaking a taboo can be a more serious matter than breaking a law. For an archetypally privileged man to use a seventeen-year-old for his sexual gratification is not illegal, but most of us feel that a moral law has been breached in an acute way.
They are the perfect duo for this purpose. One man represents the feudal system, the patriarchal past. The other represents the vices of secular modernity, in all its technocratic, progressive pomp. He even supplied the perfect summary of economic liberalism, declaring himself intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.
They epitomise the dark side of liberalism. I am a liberal, in that I am a fan of political and cultural liberalism. But I am also aware that cultural liberalism has a downside. It is a dangerously thin creed: individual liberty, plus a vague humanism, is not enough for humans, though it has an air of having replaced other systems of meaning and of being natural and sufficient. It is prey to darker forces, like that grinning Mephistopheles with his pool parties.
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