A self-confident culture, like the Victorian, can handle ambiguities. It has a healthy respect for hypocrisy, which, as I think Snoop Dogg once said, is the tribute vice pays to virtue. It’s ok with concepts like legal-but-forbidden and illegal-but-tolerated. Prostitution was the former, homosexuality the latter, and so far was it illegal-but-tolerated that feminist icon Naomi Wolff got herself into a spot of bother over it, the kind that only a feminist icon can (i.e. “the kind that even the most basic research would’ve disproven in about five minutes“). The point of the statutes isn’t so much to regulate behavior, as it is to express society’s mores.
Only in the modern period do we feel we need black-letter law for everything. And once we’ve got formal law, of course, the very next thing we do is start carving out penumbras and emanations, because we are so far from a self-confident culture that we must constantly prove to ourselves what clever, clever boys we are …
Severian, “Barely Legal”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-21.
May 6, 2024
QotD: Confident cultures … unlike our modern one
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