Soren wrote on Jan 12
th, 2012 at 9:01pm:
The point about shame and stigma, as Scruton makes it, is that it is now near-verboten to stigmatise things that valorise social fregmentation. What is hissed down with vehemence are things that are pushing towards social cohesion.
I wish I was smart enough to understand your post, old chap, but I'll stick to Rog if I may.
The laws that have arisen to replace stigmas are largely civil laws, intended to protect what Enlightenment thinkers saw as human rights. Only a few years ago in Australian cities, vagrants were routinely collected and locked up each night by the police. You could be institutionalised for life on the whim of a psychiatrist. Subnormals, morons and even the deaf were hid away from public view, and many of them "sanitised" to prevent offspring. Lunatics were not allowed to travel on the King's roads, requiring canal systems to transport them to assylums. Unmarried mothers were sent away to give birth and often had their babies taken away for their own good. Blacks who looked a bit white were forceably removed from their families. Epileptics and homosexuals were locked away in asylums. Even disabled veterans whose wounds were too distasteful for public view were kept out of society, often voluntarily based on their disfigurement, their stigma internalised.
Many of these practices were not technically legal, of course. The police didn't charge the homeless when they put them in jail for the night. Why bother with the paperwork? They knew most of their prisoners by name - many of them veterans - and believed they were doing them a favour.
In all these cases, laws were created - or existing laws were applied - to protect people. And what purpose did such stigmas serve? When the economy and technologies changed, the stigmas went with them. Women's participation in the workforce and the inventon of the pill put an end to the unmarried slut mother stigma. The post-war boom and the resulting civil rights movement empowered blacks. New medications changed the way madness was treated. The rise of social gaze on sex saw gays fight their stigmas (and through performances like drag, parodied the stigmas to do it).
In all these cases, stigmas were a form of social control which could not have functioned without a willing population. Likewise, when institutional and popular will changed, the stigmas were undermined, but this did not come without a great deal of resistance against institutional powers and ideas; the old boys.
Which is why it makes perfect sense that an old boy like Roger Scruton would argue to bring back internalised forms of social control. In itself, of course, this is no bad thing.
But the past was no rosy utopia of benevolent fraternity. In many cases it was corrupt, callous and so indifferent to cruelty that it had to be kept behind closed doors.
The beauty of stigmas for ideologues is that, like ideology, they are accepted as part of the natural order. This is how honour killings happen: someone spreads a rumour - true or false - and the shame must be addressed. Basically, it's how how caste systems are maintained.
So sure, bring it back, but know exactly what it is you're defending.
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