Was it Andy Warhol who said, “Everyone is famous for fifteen minutes?” If he is right my wife and I have had our moment, and it came because a frenzied media needed to fill time and space. It all started when the BBC filled an hour of radio time with a phone-in about a young woman called Poppy Smart. Poppy was so upset at being whistled at by men on a building site that her complaint was taken up by feminists. They also noted that Poppy had been subjected to crude verbal comments and gestures.
A campaign then started to classify wolf whistling as a sexual offence alongside rape, and so the BBC’s Nicky Campbell invited views on his phone-in. It was then that the countdown to our moment of fame began. My call was broadcast at 9:55am and I said, “Perceptions and Pieties change but if today’s politically correct pieties had applied in the nineteen thirties, I would not be here today.”
I recounted how a petite blond was walking with a girl-friend when they were overtaken by two young men on bicycles, whereupon she gave a wolf whistle. As a result of that tuneful encounter three years later I was born. But the story does not finish there; amazingly, about the same time a young lady named Celia was whistling after a bus. This led to her marrying the Conductor and ultimately to my meeting their second daughter.
After the programme the BBC rang back to say that they had received a huge response and that the national press wanted the story. So it was that the next day an account and a picture appeared in ‘The Sun.’
The newspaper’s journalist Katie Glass put the Poppy incident in the context of her own indignation with politically correct feminists who “Tell us what we can and can’t do, and then arrogantly tell us what we should feel about things.” Katie also wrote that if men can’t whistle, why should women be able to ogle Poldark or David Beckham or chuck underwear at Tom Jones?
No doubt, there is something to be said for both views, but Katie got me thinking about the philosophies behind these views. Miss Glass is obviously not a politically correct (PC) liberal, but her article led me to conclude that political correctness is based on a false assumption of human nature and that it is neither liberal nor correct.
The seeds of current PC thought were planted three hundred years ago when Jean-Jacques Rousseau, (1712-1778) turned traditional notions of a dark-side to human nature (original sin) upside down.
He wrote that children are born pure, happy and innocent and so, being “wholly good,” are morally superior to adults. He then argued that, as adults and social conditions corrupt inherent goodness it was necessary to plan a perfect system of societal living. His ideas powered the French Revolution, and are the assumptions behind all the systems of social work, justice and education organised by the modern State. It is Rousseau’s rosy view of human nature that has led to the current situation whereby crime and unsocial behaviour cannot be the fault of an individual, but is the ‘fault’ of ‘society’ and its system of governance.
However many believe that the dark-side of human nature has not gone away, and hope that future public policy will change to draw a balance between the rosy views of Rousseau and the views of Thomas Hobbes the Malmesbury Philosopher; (1588–1679) who regarded human beings as self-centred and prone to social conflict.
We must hope, that the present batch of politicians will realise that humans have a dark side as well as a good one and legislate accordingly.
This month’s article started with the thought that everyone has a fifteen minute chance to have an impact on others. We then saw how two whistling girls attracted two lads which then led to you reading my words. But I end with another’s words;
A gravestone on the Pacific Island of Tanna tells of John G. Paton: “When he arrived here in 1848 there were no Christians, when he died in 1872 there were no Heathens.”
A hundred years later when a group of ardent communists visited and told the islanders there was no God, the Chief instantly replied, “Wow!”
“It’s lucky Paton got here first or we would have eaten you.”
View from the Pew 