...was general, and the ugly imagery confirmed growing suspicion that our Islamic leadership is stuck in the Dark Ages.

But it's less clear that the sheik was entirely wrong. Perhaps he could even be seen as a kind of messenger bringing bad news. What he was complaining about, if we're honest, was a process that has been going on so long, and has now gone so far, that it has become the water we swim in and the air we breathe: a sexually heightened moral environment far removed from any known culture in the past, in which everyday activities like buying a paper or visiting a supermarket continually present us with acres of erotica and exciting flesh--along with once forbidden instincts, thoughts, and desires now normalised and routine.

My second question is this: Has a moral tsunami left our middle classes, the erstwhile custodians of civil order and decency, in ruins? What has been the corrupting role we ourselves have played in this state of affairs--every one of us, that is, from the sensation-mongering media at the bottom, to our most celebrated cultural paragons at the top?

Recently the papers have been filled with scandalised reports of paedophilia in a surprising variety of milieus. Have the works of even our most gifted artists and exalted writers contributed to a climate in which this too has become inevitable?

The sheik's comments were tasteless. His language was brutal. But can we truly say they were unprovoked?

ART AND INNOCENCE

"THE KINGDOM OF ART increases and that of health and innocence declines. So wrote Thomas Mann, and he knew what he was talking about. Moral degeneration and civilisational decline, he argued, come with the ascendancy of the modern artist and the subversive role of art in modern life, a doctrine fully explicit in his novella Tonio Kroger. There he told us that artists were estranged from life, pursued goals hostile to life, worked continually to subvert and destroy the bourgeois firmament, and that they would jeer triumphantly when it came tumbling down.

But this was augury. In 1903, when he wrote it, the most likely threat to the middle classes was violent revolution. Nobody foresaw (how could they?) that capitalism would be more easily debauched...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



More articles from Quadrant
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