We all pretended to believe, then as now, that ‘shaming’ people in order to keep society within those limits was bad

From Rejecting The Machine, In conversation with Paul Kingsnorth by Freya India

I realise I’m starting to sound like a grumpy old man, but perhaps we need more grumpy old men, and women, to put things right again.

Speaking of which, you might be too young to remember Mary Whitehouse, the campaigner for ‘decency’ on the TV, who was very well-known from the 1960s to the 1980s. At one point she led a fairly big movement of mostly older, mostly female and mostly Christian campaigners for ‘traditional values’. She was the original critic of the ‘permissive society’ as it was called back in the sixties, and by the time I was growing up she was a running joke amongst the ‘sophisticated’, university-educated, alternative comedy types. Everybody knew she was a fossil and her values were repressive and wrong. Except … these days I find myself basically on her side. She was right about where it was all going, and I suppose that if she could see our pornified present, full of anxiety and anger and broken, fragile young people, she might feel grimly vindicated. 

What she represented back then was a culture of limits that was being superseded by a culture of liberation. We all pretended to believe, then as now, that ‘shaming’ people in order to keep society within those limits was bad, and that we should not judge or condemn any behaviour at all, however socially damaging. But no culture in history has ever believed that. And in fact, in the age of ‘cancel culture’ we don’t believe that either. We still shame people for all sorts of things - racism, sexism, homophobia and a host of ‘isms’ real or imagined. What we don’t shame is personal vanity, sexual licence, anti-social behaviour or any expression of sexuality, no matter how niche or damaging. What we have done is to promote personal ‘liberation’ to the exclusion of all other values - and that particular value just happens to be the one which is most easily monetised. The result is a culture in which the pressure to Instagram yourself is both psychologically damaging and highly profitable. The culture is profane and commercial at the same time. They feed off of each other.