Climate Change

One of the useful aspects of living a reasonably long life, as I have had the good fortune to do, is that you get to see all sorts of changes, for the better and for the worse, and are granted the precious understanding that things really do change in unexpectedly fundamental ways. (Except for human nature. We remain, and always will remain, an extraordinarily stupid species. Experience merely confirms the obvious on this one.)

I've been reminded lately of something one of my teachers pointed out many years ago which, at the time, sounded deeply unlikely to me. He reckoned that we would eventually see a distinct move away from the general permissiveness of British society in terms of its prevailing sexual mores towards a kind of new puritanism. I stress here that he wasn't launching into some kind of jeremiad against those mores, simply taking a cool-headed view of long-term possibilities.

Recent references in the British media to the 'culture' of the period in which the egregious Savile perpetrated his horrors seem to me to confirm this. Yes, there was a period in which the idea of very young girls being involved in relationships of a sexual nature with older men, sometimes considerably older, would have hardly raised an eyebrow. Yet it now seems almost unthinkable, certainly painful, that this could have been the case. (By the way, it's by no means unthinkable that such relationships exist, and will continue to do so. Human folly remains fairly consistent, I suspect, from generation to generation. See the parenthesis above.)

So what changed? I suspect we rediscovered what we've always known: the powerful sometimes, too often, are prone to exploit the weak and vulnerable. Create a climate in which sexual predators can flourish and they will flourish. (It's important to bear in mind that such characters can also flourish in a climate of unreasonable oppression. Unlike Mrs Thatcher I have distinct doubts about Victorian Values.)

One thing I've learned from lived experience is that the ethical climate of a society is something real, even though apparently nebulous as a concept. A sane society seeks to cultivate that climate in ways conducive to a general flourishing of what we are. Get it wrong and someone will pay the price.