Culture and anarchy
Dominic Green
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“We should teach the best that has been thought and said,” that Victorian killjoy Matthew Arnold told us in Culture and Anarchy. As I was in New York City with the children, I followed the Arnoldian injunction and took out a mortgage on some tickets to a Broadway show. I would pay tout prices not to endure Hamilton, so it was with some relief that I saw that Some Like It Hot, an adaptation of Billy Wilder’s cross-dressing jazz caper, was at the Shubert Theatre.
It was great. The band was hot, the hoofing energetic, and the tunes catchy. The transvestite comedy survives, though the plot has been rewritten so that Jerry isn’t just dressing up as Daphne. He really is a woman in some deep way that defies rational explanation, though it can be expressed through high-kicking in a red flapper dress cut to the thigh.
Daphne’s trans epiphany received the now-obligatory whooping from the cheap seats. When a woman shouted out, “Period!” I thought she was a heckler, challenging Daphne to demonstrate a distinctive attribute of female physiology. But then, I realized she was signaling that, as far as she was concerned, it was case closed on Daphne’s manhood. I’d rather people brought lukewarm takeout into a theater than overheated politics, but anyway, who cares? As Jack Lemmon’s Daphne said, “Nobody’s perfect.” Osgood didn’t seem to mind, either.
Sashaying from the sublime to the ridiculous, back in my hotel cubicle, I watched clips from this year’s CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference. This, too, is a farrago of vulgarity, only without the fancy footwork and slick timing. Topping the bill were His Majesty the King-in-Exile Donald Trump and, in the role of cheerless court jester, Michael Knowles of the Daily Wire.
Trump is an old-time soft-shoe and gag man, but this time, he was doing his Machiavelli bit, which comes off like Billy Crystal doing Macbeth. “I am your warrior. I am your justice,” he said, wiping his dagger on his doublet and hose. “And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.” Republicans may indeed wonder if a third Trump nomination is a retribution. The party of business has cross-dressed as a populist workers’ party for so long that it’s no longer sure what it is.
Knowles made the headlines. “There can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism,” he said. “It is all or nothing.” For the sake of truth and for “the good of the poor people who have fallen prey to this confusion,” transgenderism, Knowles said, “must be eradicated from public life entirely — the whole preposterous ideology.” Cue furious acclaim from the Right and equally furious outrage from the Left.
Trump and Knowles are the Josephine and Geraldine of conservatism. Josephine and Geraldine aren’t really women, and Trump and Knowles aren’t really conservatives. Actual conservatives want to conserve culture, not unleash anarchy and the mob. But the mob likes it hot, so down we go. As Matthew Arnold (pronouns: Sir, M’lud) said, “The anarchical tendency of our worship of freedom in and for itself, of our superstitious faith, as I say, in machinery, is becoming very manifest.”
Transgenderism is a scientific fiction and a lucrative business that makes a mockery of the Hippocratic oath. It is dangerous, too, and not just for children. A “superstitious faith” in the “machinery” of science is a familiar modern form of delusion, and it never ends well. But once an idea has been thought and said, it cannot be “eradicated.” It can only be suppressed. The Republicans should have learned this from the war on terror.
Should we make it illegal for ostensibly sane adults to mutilate themselves or go Lady Gaga on hormones? It used to be illegal to attempt suicide, and failed suicides were prosecuted. That was wrong. To prosecute a failed suicide is to torment the afflicted. We must remain free, even if it is to ruin ourselves. But we should not expect the taxpayer to pay for the pills and surgeries.
Nor should we be coerced into applauding a charade. Just as we have rights to damage ourselves in all kinds of foolish ways, we also have a right to express concern, revulsion, and sincere moral objection. The machinery of science has created a new avenue for foolish self-harm. The false ideology, which is its sales pitch, must be kept away from the children.
The alternative is two kinds of tyranny. One is the tyranny of universal eradication, which is unenforceable. The other is the tyranny of universal enforcement, which will fail eventually but will do great harm in the meantime, especially to children. If the Democrats really want to put trans activism on the K-12 curriculum and a “Drag Queen Story Hour” in every library, the worst that can be thought and said around children, then let them. It will blow up in their faces in 2024.
The Right is right on this matter, but the tone of the Right’s response counts for more. The middle ground still exists in American culture, despite all the anarchy. Compassion, common sense, and competence — in Arnold’s words, “clearing human confusion, and diminishing the sum of human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it” — are virtues of culture that justify themselves. They can also win elections.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on Twitter @drdominicgreen.