SCAPEGOATS AND SEXUAL HYSTERIA

The social climb—or fall—of a superorganism radically redecorates the psychic interior of the individuals who form its constituent parts. Being bounced from one rung to another reshapes personal emotions, warps the lenses of perception, and twists the course of behavior. In the next few chapters, we’ll dig into a few of the more peculiar consequences for the world in which we live today.

When the pecking order status of a national superorganism slides, a frustrated populace looks for someone to blame, preferably a character located conveniently close to home. A declining Victorian England seized on Oscar Wilde, perhaps the most dazzling literary genius of his day. His plays, short stories, fairy tales, and essays scintillated. His wit was exquisite, his cynicism startling. The frenzy that led to Wilde’s imprisonment all began with a book.

It was 1893 when Max Nordau published Degeneration. England’s Great Depression had been dragging on for twenty years.639 The island kingdom that had led the world into brave new technologies at the turn of the nineteenth century was becoming a technological and industrial backwater. The English knew they were in trouble, but they didn’t know why. Then Max Nordau uncovered the real cause. The culprits behind Britain’s fall were modern philosophy, modern art, and modern novels. As historian Barbara Tuchman puts it in The Proud Tower,

Through six hundred pages of mounting hysteria, he [Max Nordau] traced the decay lurking impartially in the realism of Zola, the symbolism of Mallarmé, the mysticism of Maeterlinck, in Wagner’s music, Ibsen’s dramas, Manet’s pictures, Tolstoy’s novels, Nietzsche’s philosophy, Dr. Jaeger’s woolen clothing, in Anarchism, Socialism, women’s dress, madness, suicide, nervous diseases, drug addiction, dancing, sexual license, all of which were combining to produce a society without self-control, discipline or shame which was “marching to its certain ruin because it is too worn out and flaccid to perform great tasks.”640

In the days before television and the compact disc, poetry, plays, and novels were the equivalent of today’s electronic mass-consumer fare. Nordau was indicting all of pop culture.

One of the most visible popular artists of the day was Oscar Wilde. In 1895, his play The Importance of Being Earnest was a huge success. His books were widely read and his humor was quoted everywhere. But Wilde’s sexual habits were exactly the kind that all good citizens knew were destroying England. Oscar was a homosexual.

When the flamboyant author filed a libel case against the marquess of Queensbury, Wilde, rather than the marquess, suddenly became the subject of scrutiny. A series of trials luridly pictured affairs with male prostitutes, a valet, a groom, and even a boat attendant. The newspapers flew into a fit of moral outrage. Cabbies and newsboys derided Oscar’s sins. His books were removed from the stores. Two young noblemen implicated in similar activities were quietly let off the hook, but Wilde was sent to prison for two years. The incarceration drained the life from him. A mere thirty-six months after his release from Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde died. He was forty-six years old.

Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment did not save England, nor did the publication of Nordau’s irascible book; but both gave the English the comfortable illusion that they had some sort of control over their unpleasant fate, and both distracted Britain from that fate’s actual causes.

Since the early 1970s, America has experienced a decline similar to that which afflicted Victorian England. For decades, our exports exceeded our imports. That began to change in 1971. In 1973, we were victimized by an oil embargo that left normally confident American motorists stranded for hours in line waiting for a few gallons of gas. It was our first taste of helplessness.

Presidential adviser Pat Caddell sent a memo to Jimmy Carter in 1979 saying that the United States was in a new, invisible kind of crisis, “a crisis of confidence marked by a dwindling faith in the future, . . . [a crisis that] threatens the political and social fabric of the nation.”641 The year of Caddell’s memo, 33 percent of Americans saw their lives going straight downhill.642 By 1987, things had gotten worse. According to pollster Louis Harris, a full 60 percent “felt a basic sense of powerlessness” despite the apparent prosperity of the 1980s.643

Then an author came to the rescue. In 1987, America disgorged its own Max Nordau. He was an obscure professor from the University of Chicago named Allan Bloom. Like Nordau, Bloom knew exactly who to blame for America’s decline. He did not level a bony finger at the industrialists who ignored the commercial possibilities of the flat-panel video and the VCR, but eerily echoed Nordau. Bloom fulminated against a set of dead German philosophers—Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger. And like Nordau, he raged against popular culture, but instead of Oscar Wilde, Bloom attacked rock and roll. “Sex, hate and a smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love” are the themes of rock, he declared dogmatically.644 “Such polluted sources issue in a muddy stream where only monsters can swim.” In MTV videos, Bloom pontificated, “Hitler’s image recurs frequently . . . in exciting contexts. . . . Nothing noble, sublime, profound, delicate, tasteful or even decent can find a place in such tableaux.” He claimed that rock is a “gutter phenomenon,” obsessed with sex, violence, and drugs, ruining “the imagination of young people,”645 stealing their zest for learning, impoverishing their emotions, turning them into callow participants in a nation’s decline.

One of rock’s primary crimes, Bloom claimed, was an overt celebration of sexuality. In Bloom’s view, only when sex is driven underground can man create. The pent-up libido, Bloom claimed, is the driving force behind all ennobling accomplishments. (The professor, by the way, was a bachelor.)

Bloom never cited a single fact that would justify his bizarre coupling of sexual gratification with creative sterility. What’s more, his view of rock was absurd. Drug lyrics had practically disappeared from rock music over fifteen years before Bloom wrote his book. Hate had never been a major rock theme (though it would later surface in a musical form Bloom was unaware of: rap). And at the time Bloom penned his work, Hitler’s image simply had never appeared in an MTV video. (Two years after Bloom’s screed hit the stands, Hitler finally showed up in one MTV clip: the führer materialized in Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror,” a work that urged social responsibility and held up Hitler as an icon of evil.)

But Bloom’s singling out of a scapegoat satisfied a deep hunger for someone to blame. His book was wildly successful, and its influence was everywhere. A December 8, 1987, editorial in The New Republic picked up the professor’s theme. It pointed a prophetic finger at “the prospect of decline that lurks . . . in America,” lamented that “our cities have . . . become centers of barbarism,” and deplored “the exacerbated cultural degradation of man and environment.” The cause of all this? Rock music, with its “numbing norms . . . of random drugs, random sex, and random violence.”646

The exaggerated—and often false—charges spurred a spate of legal actions. The FCC revised its policies on “obscenity.” The new doctrine was worded so murkily that almost anything could be deemed obscene. In response, the listener-supported Pacifica radio stations were forced to suspend their plans to read Allen Ginsberg’s classic poem “Howl” on the air.

But that was just the tip of the iceberg. A nineteen-year-old store clerk in Calloway, Florida, was arrested for selling a rap album that contained the word pussy. She was taken to jail, and the store she’d worked for was driven out of business. Police broke into the San Francisco home of political rock singer Jello Biafra and arrested him for “selling material harmful to minors.” The material in question was a poster by Academy Award-winning designer H. R. Geiger included in a Biafra album. Displayed in numerous galleries, the poster was a surrealistic landscape of penises and vaginas designed to “criticize the standardization of mass consumer society.” For nearly two years, Biafra was forced to abandon music and mount a legal defense. By the time he was acquitted, his rock group had disbanded.647

In Illinois, a law was introduced before the legislature that would have enabled officials to arbitrarily declare the goods of a bookstore, record store, or video store obscene. Armed with this charge, the government would have been empowered to seize the suspect’s property—his store, inventory, bank accounts, and even his home—without a trial.648 A similar piece of legislation—the so-called Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act—was introduced in Congress. Though numerous congressmen and senators admitted privately that the bill was thoroughly unconstitutional, it passed both Houses without a dissenting vote.649 The hysterical search for scapegoats had mounted to such a height that “innocent until proven guilty” was about to be suspended in the case of pop culture.

The pattern was a common one in history. A slide down the ladder of nations brings a search for scapegoats and a rise in sexual hysteria. When Rome was under attack by Hannibal, its citizens looked for a solid, conservative dictator. The man they found pointed out that the traditional religious rituals had been either dropped or carried out with appalling carelessness. The new leader hurriedly restored the old-time worship of the gods.650 A year later, Hannibal was still ravaging the countryside, so Rome’s brave citizens looked for a few humans to blame their troubles on. A diligent “inquiry” uncovered the fact that two of the vestal virgins had been less than entirely virginal. To rid the city of its sins, the Romans buried one of the oversexed young women alive (The other saved her neighbors the trouble. She committed suicide.) Just to be safe, the guardians of respectability interred a few visiting foreigners as well.651 The return to Rome’s old moral shibboleths did not make Hannibal go away.

In the history of our species, the interlocked phenomena of sexual hysteria and the search for scapegoats allow the social beast moving down the pecking order to ignore the forces shoving it toward the bottom. England used Oscar Wilde to seize pop culture by the scruff of the neck and give it a vicious shake. In doing so, Britain forgot the: industrialists who had allowed the new chemical and electrical technologies to slip through their fingers. She overlooked the complacency that had eroded the international standing of her schools. She turned away from the siphoning of funds into damaging mergers and takeovers. Max Nordau’s denunciation of pop culture did not stop the British economic slump. It did, however, divert England’s energies from the tasks that could have saved her.

If you find an error or have any questions, please email us at admin@erenow.org. Thank you!