4: Many thousands of fountain pens must have been made in the eighteenth century.

Many thousands of fountain pens must have been made in the eighteenth century.

But one particular pen resides in a museum because that particular pen is the one with which Thomas Jefferson signed the Declaration of Independence.

But surely, Captain Picard could use teleportation and replication technology to make a replica of the fountain pen, identical to the original at a sub-atomic level. Do you now have two instances of Jefferson’s pen? Could you in principle have thousands of iterations of that one pen? And would they all now be the pen with which Jefferson signed the Declaration of Independence? Over the last two millennia, billions of tons and trillions of gallons of the actual body and blood of Christ have been consumed by pious Catholics.

Even those of us who are not that interested in rare books can see that a mint condition copy of the first edition of Lord of the Rings with an intact dust jacket is worth more than a mint condition copy of the first edition of Lord of the Rings without a dust jacket. But it might sometimes happen that a particular collector has kept his dust jacket pristine but inadvertently spilled tea on the interior pages of the book; while another might have kept the book in good condition but scrunched up the dust jacket. But it turns out that if you take the undamaged dust jacket and put it around the undamaged book, you do not have a mint condition first edition of Lord of the Rings. You have actually committed a kind of artistic fraud. The rest of us wonder what difference it could possibly make.

Phillip K Dick’s frivolous suggestion (in the Man in the High Castle) is that Thomas Jefferson’s pen must contain a sub-atomic particle—call it Historium if you like—which the matter replicator cannot reproduce.

He is being silly. But it does seem that a very large number of people believe that pictures and books and words contain sub-atomic particles called Obscenium, Pornographium, Racisium and Wokium.

In the Star Wars prequels, it turns out that spirituality is not a subjective, ineffable state: a Jedi Knight can be scanned for Midichlorians and discovered to be either Strong or Weak in the Force.

Perhaps we could in principle create a detector that could isolate the amount of Smuttium in Michelangelo’s David and the amount of Racistium in my beloved rag-doll.

We have mentioned Simon Heffer before. His unintentionally comedic grammar book, Strictly English, maintains that the meaning of all English words was irrevocably fixed when the Oxford English Dictionary was completed.

He acknowledges that new words like “television” and “internet” may occasionally have to be coined; but any usage of a pre-existing word which deviates from the 1928 definition is simply wrong (and barbaric, and a threat to the future of civilisation).

Christian fundamentalists believe that the true meaning of the Bible was in flux until the creation of a unique and perfect English version in 1611, which can never be improved on. I do not know if Heffer envisaged seventeen cloistered Rabbis producing seventeen textually identical copies of the Oxford English Dictionary under divine supervision. It would not greatly surprise me if he did.

I once had an argument with an internet pedant who strongly objected to use of electrocute to mean “to receive an electric shock”. The word, he opined, irreducibly meant “to be killed with electricity”.

Interestingly, he deprecated “he was electrocuted while trying to fix the light and had to be treated for burns” but permitted “he recklessly climbed a pylon and was electrocuted.” But so far as I can see, this is not the original meaning of the word. Electrocute is a vile portmanteau of “execution” and “electricity”, coined by Thomas Eddison to refer to his new system of judicial torture. (He had previously considered calling it “dynamort”.) You can’t say someone stuck his fingers in a plug socket and was electrocuted, any more than you can say that someone stepped out in front of a fast-moving car and was guillotined. 

Except, I suppose, as a colourful metaphor.

But then, if we believe in essential meanings, we have no right to say that a murderer was executed. You don’t execute people, you execute sentences, in the same way you execute wills and real estate contracts. And come to that, electricity didn’t originally mean a force, a charge, or a current. It originally meant “the quality of being attractive”, and before that (according to Wikipedia) “pertaining to amber”.

People who have vaguely heard that there is such a thing as Critical Theory believe that English Literature Departments teach that texts mean exactly what you want them to mean. Books like Strictly English are more or less conscious attempts to slay the imaginary Post-Modern foe. I suppose that was what Jordan Peterson has in mind when he insists that “brown” is always and only a description of skin-tone and never a label of ethnic heritage, even when the speaker is quite clearly using it in the latter sense.

But no-one has ever argued that texts mean whatever you want them to mean. No-one has ever argued that when Propsero says “Pluck my magic garment from me”, pluck means “hold a referendum”, magic means “a common market in goods and services” and garment means “free movement.” But any fool can see that two different people might read the Tempest and come away with different impressions about how wicked Prospero is, how hard-done-by Caliban is, and how completely unfunny Trincolo is.

Tolkien said that he disliked allegory. Cordially.

But mark what followed. He did not say “The Lord of the Rings is not allegory: it’s just a story, a piece of light entertainment, stop reading stuff into it.”

He said that the Lord of the Rings meant whatever any individual reader thought that it meant: and that you shouldn’t necessarily give special status to what he thought it meant just because he wrote it. Allegory, on his definition, was not critics reading things into books: it was authors trying to insist that their meanings were the only ones.

“I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”

This doesn’t mean that “three rings for the elven kings under the sky” means, or might mean, “seventeen pairs of sneakers for the seventeen delegates from the department of trade and industry.”

But it does mean that although Tolkien thought that the elves’ magic lembas bread was like the holy wafer in the Catholic Mass; and even though Tolkien consciously edited the book to make the likeness more obvious, readers aren’t obliged to think of the body of Jesus every time anyone reaches for some elf-bread.

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3: It might well be argued that decency and modesty are religious taboos....

 It might well be argued that the idea that you shouldn’t show nude pictures to children is a religious taboo.

It might equally be argued that all ideas about ethics and behaviours are religious taboos. But most of us think, that “you shouldn’t kill anyone without a very good reason” and “you should remove your footwear before coming into a place of worship” are in rather different categories. The danger of puritanism is that every personal taboo is raised to the level of a universal moral imperative.

I avert my eyes from certain images; therefore, everyone should be obliged to wear blindfolds.

If we allow churches and mosques to enforce the head-covering taboo, it is only a matter of time before the Home Secretary makes a rule that all ladies have to wear a headscarf in public

The solution to this is to send purity patrols into Wee Free Churches and rip the hats off all the ladies. I understand this has literally been tried on French beaches.

The more we tolerate people’s religious taboos, the more taboos fringe religious groups will think up. If we say “That’s all right, you don’t have to come to morning prayers if you don’t want to” then pretty soon the guru will decide that members of his sect are also not allowed to participate in egg and spoon races, flower-pressing competitions or Sociology.

The more taboos a religion imposes, the harder it is for members of the sect to integrate with the wider culture. The less the religion integrates, the more likely it is to survive. This is one of the reasons successful religions have long lists of obscure prohibitions.

Do you remember that scene in Twelve Angry Men where the Bigoted White Juror fumes at the Nice Hispanic Juror?

“Why are you always so goddamn polite??”

“I think” replies the nice Puerto Rican man “For the same reason you are not: it is the way I was brought up.”

Young children tend to split the world into good and bad, wrong and right, naughty and nice. Tell a small child that he can go to the end of the path, but no further, and he may very well try going two steps beyond the gate, to see what happens, but he generally won’t run down the street and across the road.

Sophisticated parents don’t treat this as a bold act of defiance, but merely a way of understanding where the boundaries are. Sometime around puberty, we start to be able to make finer judgments: to be able to understand concepts like “this thing is forbidden, except when it’s allowed” and “I’ll make an exception just this one time, because it’s an unusual circumstance.” Ask a young child if a starving person can steal food, they will probably say “Stealing is naughty”. Ask a teenager, and they’ll admit that it’s a difficult question.

Political conservatives and religious fundamentalists often have, or pretend that they have, the moral perspective of an eight year old. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong. Something can’t be good on Monday and bad on Tuesday. God created Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve. Situational ethics and postmodernism will lead to the downfall of society.

Why does Andrew think that black face dolls, public nudity, and the word fuck are generally inappropriate? For the same reason that you do. It is the way we were brought up.

I don’t buy the theory that a naturist is harmed by the sight of pants in the same way and to the same degree that a puritan is harmed by the sight of genitals.

I don’t buy the theory that the same liberalism which says that a Muslim lady has the right to keep her face covered if she wants to also says that a humanist has the right to not see ladies wearing burkas if he doesn’t want to.

I don’t buy the theory that the same liberalism which says that a transexual person should be allowed to go to the lavatory if they need to also says that a prejudiced person shouldn’t have to use a cubical adjacent to one that might have a transexual person in it if they don’t want to.

Some people say “If Christians are allowed to take Good Friday off work it logically follows that Satanists should be allowed to carry out human sacrifices” but they don’t really believe it.

I think that under most circumstances, where it is reasonable, all other things being equal, we ought to respect people’s religious traditions. And we pretty much agree on when things are equal and when they are not. We are mostly cool with Jews abstaining from pork pies; but not with Jews saying that no-one else should eat pork pies and definitely not with them closing down Melton Mowbray in case someone inadvertently walks past a pork pie factory.

I think that most adults can see that an anatomically accurate representation of an adult nude figure in a book about human anatomy is semiotically different from an accurate representation of an adult nude figure in a life-drawing class; and an adult actor taking his clothes off in an erotic movie sold only to adults is not doing the same thing as he would be if he sent a stranger an unsolicited explicit e-mail. We grok that you can take your clothes off in a sports-centre changing room but not in a sport-centre bar.

Contexts may overlap. There may be misunderstandings. Sometimes we may have to say “Whoops, so sorry, I thought the door was locked.” If I thought I was watching a documentary about professional footballers and suddenly found myself looking at a group of nude men in the shower, I might well say “That embarrassed me.” I might even say “That made me feel violated and dirty” or “That made me ritually unclean and unable to take the sacrament” or “That brought on a post-traumatic shock reaction because I was assaulted by a person with a similar body part some years ago.”

Which is why we tend to put warnings on that kind of material. “Contains nudity”. “Includes images which you may consider indecent.”

Some people might think that a sign saying “WARNING: If you come through this door you might catch a glimpse of a naked man” placed outside an exhibition of Greek Sculpture—or, indeed, a men’s changing room—was silly and unnecessary. Others might find it quite helpful.

But it really wouldn’t be a threat to free speech, democracy, and the continuation of western civilisation.

Nor, come to that, would a couple of judicious fig-leaves.

There is a lovely chaotic old fashioned toy museum in Sidmouth—less an exhibition than a repository of Teddy Bears and models trains and Muffin the Mules and Star Wars Lego that people have donated over the decades.

I can’t directly recall if the have any gollywogs on display, but I would be surprised if it didn’t.

I assume that somewhere in the world there is an International Jam Jar Museum. If there is, I imagine it includes jars with the offending character on the label.

I felt some sympathy for the enthusiasts who had restored an old bus, complete with a very old fashioned advertisement for Robertsons Marmalade on the side, and were asked if they wouldn’t please mind removing it.

Anatomically correct images of naked men could be exhibited in such a way as to constitute pornography; but equally clearly they could be exhibited in such a way as to not constitute pornography.

And, as a matter of fact, pornography may be relatively innocent or very harmful indeed.

I once saw a movie which consisted of nothing but still photographs of gentlemen’s private parts. It was second feature to an extremely dull film about Italian nuns, I seem to remember. I think the point was that if you show a sufficient number of such images (dicks, I mean, not nuns) they cease to be dirty or prurient or embarrassing and just become, I don’t know, skin.

Yoko Ono made the same point about bottoms in a film called Bottoms.

As a matter of fact, my willy wouldn’t drop off if a lady caught a glimpse of it; and the lady wouldn’t go blind if she accidentally caught a glimpse of my willy.

People who have done the naturist thing says it stops mattering after about three minutes. I believe the showers at Glastonbury are co-ed.

If we could just get over ourselves a lot of the difficulties would go away. We’d instantly deprive flashers and streakers of their power and put a lot of pornographers out of business.

Sometime around 1986, comedian and Blackadder perpetrator Ben Elton did a comic stand up routine.

He asked what the world was coming to when a primary school teacher putting sun-cream on a six year old kid might be thought to be committing a sexual act; but the President of America ejaculating into the mouth of an intern might be thought not to be.

He was being disingenuous for comic effect. What Clinton claimed was that what he had done in the Oval Office did not strictly amount to sexual intercourse, a significant legal distinction if what you are being accused of is telling lies. Many of us think that, given what we now know about Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris, quite a lot of clergymen and a fair number of PE teachers, a rule which says that teachers can’t touch kids, at all, for any reason, ever, is quite a sensible rule to have.

I was reminded of the joke when two news items invaded public discourse at the same time.

A pub in England was temporarily closed because it had a collection of several hundred black-face rag-dolls on display. I think the police actually confiscated the collection, but outraged citizens donated new dolls so the display could be restored. Everyone involved asserted that there was nothing racist about the display. That the pub was called The White Hart was probably an unfortunate coincidence.

Meanwhile, the aforementioned school teacher was sanctioned for showing an carved marble penis to his art class.

What, I found myself asking, is the world coming to when a renaissance sculpture might be considered pornographic and a display of gollywogs might not be considered racist?

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2: On 25 August 2023, three Black people were shot in Jacksonville, Florida by a white man with a gun.

 On 25 August 2023, three Black people were shot in Jacksonville, Florida by a white man with a gun. This happens quite often in America. I sometimes wonder if they ought to rethink the whole idea of letting white people own guns.

There seems to be very little question that the shooter was a racist and that the attacks were racially motivated. This is what the local chief of police thought, at any rate.

A film clip went around the site formally known as Twitter in which Mehdi Hassan, an American newscaster of whom I was not previously aware, talked a lot of fairly non-controversial good sense. Racially motivated shootings are enabled by right-wing pundits who use white supremacist rhetoric. Shock-jocks and populist politicians ought to take note of who they might be emboldening. Not all white people are racists. Pundits don’t intend to provoke massacres. But after the World Trade Centre attacks, Muslims were told to take a long hard look at themselves and actively renounce the hate-preachers in their own ranks.

“Tonight, this brown Muslim is asking the white conservative community to do the same: get your house in order, crack down on the hate preachers...condemn the rise of white supremacist ideology.”

Jordan Peterson leapt into the fray. He said that Hassan “was not really brown, more like light tan, just like ‘white’ people” and added that he, Hassan, was a Caucasian “by definition”.

And I thought. There you have it. The great intellectual divide of our age. The distinction between left and right, woke and un-woke, sensible and stupid. People who believe that words have single, non-negotiable, unchangeable meanings. And people who believe in context, nuance, and interpretation.

In a word: exegesis.

“What do you mean by that?” is not a question they are able to ask. “What does this irreducibly mean?” is the only way they are capable of thinking.

You can win arguments by looking up definitions on Wikipedia. Printing “Woman, n: Adult, human, female” on your t-shirt proves some kind of point.

I went to college during the last but one intellectual epoch.

I believe I was at the actual seminar at which Post Modernism replaced Post Structuralism, at least at Sussex. I understand that Post Colonialism subsequently eclipsed both of them. By now, it’s probably Post Something Else Entirely. Critical Race Theory exists mainly in the minds of people who are very cross about it.

I never studied Critical Theory quite as closely as I was supposed to, and only got around to reading a work by Foucault during lockdown, mainly in order to annoy Liz Truss. I didn’t understand very much of it, but I think I got the gist.

Everything is text, and there is nothing but texts.

I can’t say what the Gospel According to Saint Mark or Cerebus the Aardvark irreducibly mean: but I can write down some words of my own about what Cerebus and Saint Mark mean to me. About some of the things they might possibly mean. I don’t imagine I have arrived at the truth: all I have done is created some more text. Some people may possibly think that my text is interesting in its own right. They might even think that reading my text and the sacred texts alongside each other is more interesting and fun and fruitful than reading the holy book alone. I’d be incredibly flattered if they did. I don’t suppose that I have revealed the True And Singular Meaning Of Saint Marks Gospel or Jaka’s Story.

Because there ain’t no such animal.

I am perfectly well aware that the idea that Everything Is Text would naturally appeal to people who like books. I imagine there are people for whom There Is Nothing But Jazz or Everything Is Snooker.

We are told that an art teacher in Florida has been sanctioned for showing his art class a post-card of Michelangelo’s David on the grounds that the picture is pornographic.

We have, I acknowledge, also been told that some American classrooms provide litter-trays for children who identify as cats and that gender studies has replaced mathematics in all state schools. It may very well be that “the tale of the teacher who wasn’t allowed to show his class a classical statue” is equally apocryphal. But the apocryphal story will serve to illustrate the argument which we are entirely failing to develop.

At first glance, the censor is making a good point. If it is wrong for a man to expose himself to a child in a dark alley, then it is equally wrong to display a picture of a man exposing himself to a child in a school classroom. It’s the nakedness, the exposure, or (to put it bluntly) the dick which is the problem. A flasher doesn’t get to say “I was showing my cock to kids for artistic reasons”. So a teacher doesn’t get to say “It wasn’t a dirty picture I showed your kid: it was art.”

For all I know, the American Religion may now teach that one must abstain from looking at unclothed male bodies under all circumstances whatsoever. If that is the case then broadminded people should probably be able to think up a work-around. When I was a kid, Jehovah’s Witnesses were excused morning assembly and theatre outings; so perhaps devotees of the new puritanism ought to be allowed to sit out life-drawing classes and be excused showers after gym. I am not entirely convinced that “taking all the books off the library shelf and going through them page by page to check that there are no naughty bits” is the way forward. At different periods of history, greater and lessor use has been made of fig-leaves and pixellation, and we may be entering one of the prudish periods. Young people used to say “ha-ha Granny put modesty screens around piano legs;” perhaps in a few years young people will say ha-ha Grandpa thought it was okay to look at renaissance paintings of bare-chested ladies.

Science fiction writers very often compared 1950s fashions with Victorian fashions and extrapolated that by the twenty first century we would all be nudists. It didn’t quite turn out like that.

Channel 4 is currently putting out one of those sex education programmes in which teenagers are allowed to look at adult human beings with no clothes on. I don’t know to what extent this kind of thing really strikes a blow for positive body image. It may be true that as it becomes easier and easier to obtain unrealistic pictures of naked human beings we have become correspondingly shier and shier about disrobing in front of other people: so it might be quite a good idea to show youths realistic pictures of what ordinary people who haven’t had the benefit of breast enhancement or penile prosthesis look like. It might also be that prime-time TV isn’t the best place to carry out this experiment. Channel 4 also puts out dating shows (for adults) in which (I understand) the contestants don’t wear any clothes, and (I understand) openly comment upon the parts of the body which people don’t generally comment upon openly. Which seems rather silly but essentially harmless.

I wish we were a bit less silly about bodies. If there were more nudity on TV we’d find nudity on TV less titillating; but because we find it titillating we’re not allow to see very much of it on TV.

But there is a school of thought which says that showing teenagers pictures of naked people in the context of a sex education show is exactly the same as showing teenagers pictures of naked people for sexual gratification; and that it follows that everyone involved in making the programme, and indeed, anyone who watched it, anyone who defended it, and anyone who reads this article is a nonce, and, moreover, that all nonces should be, at the very least, publicly beheaded.

Nonce is prison slang for a child molester; it entered the public domain around the time of the infamous Brass Eyes spoof.

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