Imagine how blue the air would become with shrieks and
imprecations from a more liberally minded society. And rightly so in this case,
even though I think the liberal alter-Establishment is sometimes so
outrageously silly that they merely attract understandable mockery and weaken a
worthy cause in so doing.
There’s an old British supernatural film, now regarded as
something of a classic, called The
Halfway House. It’s about a group of travellers unwittingly lodged in the
ghost of a hotel due to a time slip, and was made in 1944. It includes a scene
in which a husband takes his wife over his knee in the bathroom and spanks her
bottom. The other guests stand outside the door listening to the commotion and
laughing because it was considered entirely proper in those days for a
masterful husband to visit corporal punishment on his wife for any act or
attitude which he deemed wrong or undesirable, especially when his outrage was
supported by general societal consent.
And therein lies the point. The attitudes which people hold
to what is right and wrong, desirable and undesirable, acceptable and
unacceptable, proper and improper, are largely conditioned into them by the
culture in which they live. And most people naturally accept that conditioning
because society does not teach its subjects to question its mores, even though
a few of us are inclined to do so and our numbers appear to be swelling. They
change over time through a natural process of evolution.
So how should this inform the modern trend for bringing to
book those guilty of historical misdemeanours? In some cases it’s entirely
justified, but maybe not all. And so we owe it to common reason to ask whether
it is right to punish somebody for an action which was widely agreed to be
acceptable at the time. Is that justice or disconnected judgementalism?
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