Blog/article - Regulating Intimacy
Across the landscape now, ordinary
souls trade warm glares and bizarre, imitative ‘air-hugs’, where once private
and tender embraces embodied the bonding rituals between friends and families.
Those that defy the ban on hugs and kisses with their loved ones, confess like
guilty school children to each other, that ‘they shouldn’t be doing it’, but
all is well because they are very sure that they do not harbour the virus.
Never in human history has a state apparatus successfully mounted itself as a valid authority on intimacy between loved ones. In a culture that turns ever-increasingly more hostile to private life and stable family units, it’s no surprise that there isn’t much outrage about this short-sighted assault on our freedoms to manage who we can and cannot hug.
Not so long ago, people would have found it insulting, patronizing and infantile to abide unquestioningly to whom their prime minister gave permission to hug. This is why such concessions of freedoms did not take place in panics caused by swine-flu or the more deadly Hong Kong flu in the sixties. Since that decade, it is easy to see that we are materially richer, but this makes it even easier to neglect realising that anything has gone wrong. What sort of world is it, tomorrow, that we wish for our children to inherit?
Those that welcomed the ramping up of airport security after the world trade centre attack were told that changes would be temporary, that they would not characterize aeroplane travel forever after. When cockpits were fitted with compulsory locks that cannot be opened during flight, this made virtually all pre-flight security obsolete in curbing the terrorist threat, and yet they have remained 20 years later. This is because the security procedure served other beneficial uses in practice. Namely, the war on drugs and HM Revenue and Custom’s eternal crusade on untaxed goods.
Hijacking a plane today would be an impossible feat with or without pre-flight security but suggesting that we could ever return to an airport experience of the pre 9-11 years is unthinkable to most people. Here is an example of where out of reasonable panic, instruments of authority have supplanted themselves in places invasive to privacy. But after the threat has ceased to necessitate those instruments, they have been left in place. They have been left in place because of the unexpected benefits that were discovered when the line of privacy could be crossed in the name of safety and security.
Just how private do people believe this line should be? Is it the State’s affair to legislate restrictions on physical intimacy between two people, that value that intimacy more than the risk of a largely unthreatening virus? And if they do not value that intimacy enough because of the slim likelihood that the virus infects them and kills them, is that not their business as sovereign adult individuals to reject physical advances of intimacy, if they so wish?
Hugging may seem to the complacent eye, now to be a petty indicator of freedom, or perhaps a decadent luxury of a world without pandemic. You don’t even have to be that much of a ‘hugger’ however, to recognize that we are social primates, that depend upon large and complex social structures to navigate life. Webs of these social structures can be violent, impersonal or strictly for self-preservation. But they can also be tender, honest and in the interest of preserving others than ourselves.
It is nobody’s business, except our own, how we interact with each and every person in our life. The moment a third party’s authority can express its presence in the meetings between individuals, the relationship is perverted by obedience. The individuals are allowed to be together, because somebody else has said so. It is absolutely absurd that we so unthinkingly construct over us a bureaucracy that considers for us, how and who we can make contact with, in our social worlds.
The obvious counterargument that I have witnessed in response to my advocacy for individual choice in these matters is ‘what if people make the irresponsible choices?’. Well thank goodness, that the arbiters of truth are finally here to make the decisions for us. I can only imagine what other moral responsibilities they wish to free people of managing themselves, if they could. Where did they find this sense of arrogance regarding the freedom to make decisions, and their superiority to do so, over whom they disagree with? I have my suspicions.
Decades of progressive indoctrination by culture through the institutions of mass media and academia have cultivated a sense of self-congratulatory, morally ambiguous modernizing of whatever they see as outdated or ‘problematic’. Nothing is off limits to them, to be deconstructed and defunct under the light of their semi-religious social theories, if they do not fit. It matters not, however blindingly obvious they are as foundations to our individual freedoms. Our individual freedoms are ‘problematic’ if we decide to disagree with them. Hence, they exhibit the same stream of thinking as the lockdown enthusiasts who support legislation on hugs and gatherings, because people may freely decide to not abide.
I believe I am rightfully worried about the freedoms we so willingly retire to Westminster for their management, in our state of panic-frenzy. When the reasonable time comes to restore our right to meet and hug the ones we love, all sorts of justifications could in fact be made for keeping the new normality in place, because of unexpected benefits discovered in the name of safety and security.
Will we prefer the new way of life because of how convinced we are, that the hugless, isolated and socially distanced culture is in some way safer to our future threats? Material ones, at least.
The burning question that bubbles under the surface politics of terrorists and pandemics, is do you wish to be controlled in safety or risk danger to be free?
Never in human history has a state apparatus successfully mounted itself as a valid authority on intimacy between loved ones. In a culture that turns ever-increasingly more hostile to private life and stable family units, it’s no surprise that there isn’t much outrage about this short-sighted assault on our freedoms to manage who we can and cannot hug.
Not so long ago, people would have found it insulting, patronizing and infantile to abide unquestioningly to whom their prime minister gave permission to hug. This is why such concessions of freedoms did not take place in panics caused by swine-flu or the more deadly Hong Kong flu in the sixties. Since that decade, it is easy to see that we are materially richer, but this makes it even easier to neglect realising that anything has gone wrong. What sort of world is it, tomorrow, that we wish for our children to inherit?
Those that welcomed the ramping up of airport security after the world trade centre attack were told that changes would be temporary, that they would not characterize aeroplane travel forever after. When cockpits were fitted with compulsory locks that cannot be opened during flight, this made virtually all pre-flight security obsolete in curbing the terrorist threat, and yet they have remained 20 years later. This is because the security procedure served other beneficial uses in practice. Namely, the war on drugs and HM Revenue and Custom’s eternal crusade on untaxed goods.
Hijacking a plane today would be an impossible feat with or without pre-flight security but suggesting that we could ever return to an airport experience of the pre 9-11 years is unthinkable to most people. Here is an example of where out of reasonable panic, instruments of authority have supplanted themselves in places invasive to privacy. But after the threat has ceased to necessitate those instruments, they have been left in place. They have been left in place because of the unexpected benefits that were discovered when the line of privacy could be crossed in the name of safety and security.
Just how private do people believe this line should be? Is it the State’s affair to legislate restrictions on physical intimacy between two people, that value that intimacy more than the risk of a largely unthreatening virus? And if they do not value that intimacy enough because of the slim likelihood that the virus infects them and kills them, is that not their business as sovereign adult individuals to reject physical advances of intimacy, if they so wish?
Hugging may seem to the complacent eye, now to be a petty indicator of freedom, or perhaps a decadent luxury of a world without pandemic. You don’t even have to be that much of a ‘hugger’ however, to recognize that we are social primates, that depend upon large and complex social structures to navigate life. Webs of these social structures can be violent, impersonal or strictly for self-preservation. But they can also be tender, honest and in the interest of preserving others than ourselves.
It is nobody’s business, except our own, how we interact with each and every person in our life. The moment a third party’s authority can express its presence in the meetings between individuals, the relationship is perverted by obedience. The individuals are allowed to be together, because somebody else has said so. It is absolutely absurd that we so unthinkingly construct over us a bureaucracy that considers for us, how and who we can make contact with, in our social worlds.
The obvious counterargument that I have witnessed in response to my advocacy for individual choice in these matters is ‘what if people make the irresponsible choices?’. Well thank goodness, that the arbiters of truth are finally here to make the decisions for us. I can only imagine what other moral responsibilities they wish to free people of managing themselves, if they could. Where did they find this sense of arrogance regarding the freedom to make decisions, and their superiority to do so, over whom they disagree with? I have my suspicions.
Decades of progressive indoctrination by culture through the institutions of mass media and academia have cultivated a sense of self-congratulatory, morally ambiguous modernizing of whatever they see as outdated or ‘problematic’. Nothing is off limits to them, to be deconstructed and defunct under the light of their semi-religious social theories, if they do not fit. It matters not, however blindingly obvious they are as foundations to our individual freedoms. Our individual freedoms are ‘problematic’ if we decide to disagree with them. Hence, they exhibit the same stream of thinking as the lockdown enthusiasts who support legislation on hugs and gatherings, because people may freely decide to not abide.
I believe I am rightfully worried about the freedoms we so willingly retire to Westminster for their management, in our state of panic-frenzy. When the reasonable time comes to restore our right to meet and hug the ones we love, all sorts of justifications could in fact be made for keeping the new normality in place, because of unexpected benefits discovered in the name of safety and security.
Will we prefer the new way of life because of how convinced we are, that the hugless, isolated and socially distanced culture is in some way safer to our future threats? Material ones, at least.
The burning question that bubbles under the surface politics of terrorists and pandemics, is do you wish to be controlled in safety or risk danger to be free?
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