Jeffrey Epstein seems to have been the kind of person who, one way or another, was going to make his way in life by doing something dodgy. The fact that he did so by creating what amounted to an illegal prostitution empire for the glitterati, however, probably says more about his time than about him.
It isn't only that casual sex became freed from the taint of sin, or that it became normalised. What happened was an inversion of the traditional Christian attitude: instead of an aura of moral ambiguity, sex took on an aura of virtue. To engage in sex became praiseworthy; not to have sex became mildly reprehensible.
Christianity in the US may be different but if you look at attitudes publicly expressed by senior members of the Church of England over recent decades, I think you'll find that Britain's clerics have largely echoed this process of inversion, albeit trailing slightly behind more dominant ideological sources.
If to the strong desire for sex that's already in our DNA (or at least in men's DNA) you add the message that society approves of it, and disapproves of not doing it, then perhaps we shouldn't be surprised if there get to be openings for individuals or groups who want to make it easy to fulfil those social expectations, by facilitating and organising sexual encounters on a large scale.
• If early Christians devised and developed the be-suspicious-of-sex ideology, who's responsible for the embrace-it-enthusiastically ideology? Intellectuals, of course, the modern form of priest. The pro-sex ideology got going in the 1960s, around the time when institutionalisation and expansion of intellectuals, into a state-approved class, was gathering momentum.
You could regard the process as an extension of 19th-century utilitarianism, which right from the start was intimately associated with the state. Use logic, untainted by ideology, to make society better! Only of course, it wasn't sound logic, and it didn't exclude ideology. There's no such thing as ideology‑free intervention.
The logic with regard to sex may have gone something like this:
- Leaving aside Christian ethics or other ideology, sex is basically pleasurable.
- Blocking sex in any way, for any reason, causes frustration and unhappiness.
- Therefore, if you remove all barriers to consensual sex, you're bound to increase human happiness! And since people are still affected by the bad culture of the past, they need to be actively encouraged, e.g. by being taught that sex is good. No guilt should be attached to it!
The problem with superficial logic of this kind, applied to human affairs, is that there are usually other factors being left out of account. As Freud argued, human civilisation has moved forward (or moved in directions generally regarded as forward) by suppressing hard-wired tendencies, such as the tendency to start reproduction at puberty, or the tendency to express aggressive instincts uninhibitedly. We've freed ourselves from the Darwinian straitjacket, but it has meant deviating from the pleasure principle. Conversely, a return to the latter means going back in the direction of Stone Age standards.
It could be argued that, in doing so, feminist intellectuals have not been feminist enough. One of the challenges for an independent-minded woman is surely that of rejecting the tendency (hardwired in men?) to regard all women as defined by their gender.
• Ideological considerations have crept into movies, TV and adverts, giving them that familiar sense of containing covert political lectures. You shouldn't (for example) show a male boss with a female subordinate, this is reinforcing the wrong attitudes, so try only to show it the other way round. The same applies to whites versus other ethnicities. Show interracial relationships as much as possible, but avoid white-male/black-female couples, as this might reinforce preferences that are at least as bad (so say ideological guidelines) as the same-race one.
Such ideology may explain the strange phenomenon, recently commented on by Reform MP Sarah Pochin, that the proportion of ethnic minorities shown in adverts is out of sync with the proportions actually found in the British population as a whole. Iffy logic may again be at work. Presumably there is some argument being applied that, in order to reduce racist attitudes, we should increase exposure to other races by showing a disproportionate number in advertising. But does this actually work as supposedly intended? If one of the drivers of racism is fear of being displaced by other ethnicities, mightn't the strategy actually increase racism?
This is highly speculative, but I wonder whether the violence of some of the anti-immigration riots seen in Britain last year was influenced by contemporary advertising strategies. Does seeing a disproportionate number of non-white faces in adverts actually heighten, rather than dampen, pre-existing tensions?
• In 1949 Friedrich Hayek wrote* that intellectuals "have probably never exercised so great an influence as they do today". What would Hayek make of things three quarters of a century later? I think he might well argue that we are now ruled as much by intellectuals as by elected politicians. Intellectuals control the narratives which control our lives.
* F.A. Hayek, 'The Intellectuals and Socialism', University of Chicago Law Review, Spring 1949.