'Equality', as politically understood, is an amoral concept, which sees no distinction between good and bad, writes John Waters
STRANGE, HOW language absorbs absurdities and mounts them like fake jewels in a way that either disguises their absurd essences or normalises them so as to render the observer unsure whether the problem resides with the words or himself. Last week I happened upon a classic example in a report about a recent survey indicating that there are now, among Irish teenagers, as many female addicts as male addicts.
The report, however, centred not on any gravity to be attached to this trend, but on the assertion by one of the researchers that the findings indicate that "sexist attitudes to drug-taking have largely eroded". He declared: "The idea that it was okay for guys to go off getting drunk and off their heads but not for girls had a similar basis in the drug-taking community. This has changed now and these sexist attitudes have diminished."
Wow! That's a relief, eh? In a sense, of course, it is true that the mandatory suspension of taboos in respect of girls engaging in certain traditionally male behaviours has indeed led to many teenage girls staggering around the streets, and some lying prone among messes of syringes in back alleys. But, picking up on the implicit positivity of the report, I read on for an assurance that the elimination of sexism in this regard would soon give way to a further stage in which, perhaps, neither young females nor young males would self-destruct in these ways. No such prognosis was offered, however.
The situation as it is, it seems, is the total good news.
The researcher would probably say that he was making a value-neutral observation. But can you be value-neutral about lethal drugs? Call me ideologically obtuse (please!) but I cannot see that his statement can be interpreted other than as implying that increasing addiction among teenage girls is, in at least one respect, to be celebrated.
This example provides further confirmation that "equality", as politically understood (different, as I have said before, to the way it is defined in the dictionary) is an amoral concept, recognising no distinction between good and bad.
Those promoting the equality agenda are as interested in enabling equal-opportunities self-destruction as equal-opportunities self-advancement. Sexism is bad; therefore, it seems to follow, anything that indicates its erosion, even drug addiction, must be good.
If, right now, this seems mad, then even crazier is that most of the time it won't seem mad at all. Slowly and subtly, such logic is being normalised in our culture. Reading or hearing such a construction, we absorb its meaning and immediately suppress any sense of outrage at the idea that someone appears to be suggesting that death from heroin is better than oppression by sexism, knowing that such outrage would represent an unapproved response. Worse, at a deeper level of induction into the new value system, some may even feel a momentary stab of outrage at the idea that the dark force of sexism has for so long prevented their female children from obliterating themselves.
The researcher's construction has clearly emerged from a ghetto of logic in which obsession with a narrow set of ideological objectives has created a viewpoint from which all fundamental sense of value has been lost. Evidence of change is evidence of change, and change, being the objective, is always to be welcomed. No signs of progress are to be spurned. Egalitarians must take their scores where they can.
You might partially excuse all this by observing that we have become so accustomed to measuring progress by certain indicators that we are blinded to their meanings other than as signs of "progress" or economic activity. A recent ESRI study on behalf of the Equality Authority found that women work on average 39 minutes per day more than men, but counted all shopping time, ie, consuming, as though it were the same as working. We do this also with crime, almost subconsciously calculating crime figures as measures of our "progress" as a "modern society". Indeed, crime and its consequences make a significant contribution to GDP, as do drunkenness, heroin addiction and academic research. All feed into output and growth figures in the same way as beef production and tourism.
But there is something more disturbing here than merely an ideological myopia failing to distinguish between health and death. In the researcher's statement and its uncritical reproduction in the media, there is something additionally worrying: a stark witness to our collective confusion concerning the humanly desirable.
For four decades our culture has persisted in telling itself that freedom is the right to do as you please, and that this will make you happy. If happiness proves elusive, it is because you're not doing it right, probably because of inhibitions arising from prior oppressions and proscriptions.
The accusation that men traditionally enjoyed freedoms not available to women is predicated on the idea that freedom was, straightforwardly, the satisfaction of desire. But the emerging heroin equation, along with much besides, shouts out that our concept of freedom was never freedom at all, but quite the opposite, and that our culture, in spite of overwhelming evidence, is as determined as ever not to comprehend this.