Beastie Boys

Centre-right commentators seem to have a thing about bestiality these days, though this appears to have been prompted mainly by the advance of veganism as a dinner party topic. According to Tom Chivers, "From a utilitarian point of view, zoophilia is no more immoral than eating meat". He uses this comparison to highlight that customary disgust at certain sexual or dietary practices is often illogical and historically contingent, which is a challenge to conservative moral schemes based on tradition. In an earlier example of the genre, from 2014, Hugo Rifkind acknowledged that when it comes to animals, "We eat them because we want to, and we figure out the morality afterwards as best we can". Clearly neither is suggesting that bestiality is good, or likely to become socially acceptable. They are simply noting that dietary attitudes are changing, with meat-eating moving from the realm of the tolerable to the disgusting for some. Despite Chivers' reference to Jonathan Haidt's "moral dumbfounding" - the idea that moral values reflect personality rather than reason - this isn't an attempt to divide society into innate liberals and conservatives (and so another skirmish in the culture war) so much as an acknowledgment that disgust is a social artefact.

There is an irony in British empiricists, who would normally decry "fashionable nonsense", hinting that sexuality, as much as diet, is socially constructed. This points to a deeper truth, recently exhibited by Matt Hancock, which is that the establishment (and Chivers and Rifkind are representative) is mostly made up of moral relativists, always ready to excuse ethical lapses in the service of power. Indeed, the ready equation of postmodernism to moral relativism indicates that for many in politics and the media it is the latter which is the real subject of interest, hence the persistent yoking of the two despite academics wearily pointing out that they are not the same thing. In discursive practice, moral relativism is actually a debate about liberalism's elevation of individual conscience (e.g. Mill's harm principle) over the conservative belief that tradition and norms are the foundation of social order. It has little to do with materialism, let alone poststructuralism or "cultural Marxism". When a politician decries postmodernism, they are clearly signalling a conservative defence of social order.

But why does that defence so often employ references to bestiality? For example, just as it has become a habit among soi disant liberals to equate carnivores with sheep-shaggers, so it became a habit among traditional conservatives in recent decades to object to gay marriage on the grounds that it would open the door to human-animal unions ("Why not marry a dog?", as Charles Moore put it). But there is a difference between the two stances. Whereas traditional conservatives are clearly pointing to what they consider the absurdity of homosexual marriage, in which both it and bestiality are considered contemptible and an affront to nature, those weary liberals are suggesting that while conservative norms are necessary to ensure social order, the elite should be governed by a strict utilitarianism in which sexual morality is subservient to what Michel Foucault memorably described, in the context of Roman sexual ethics, as "the care of the self". This is not just the pursuit of selfish interest behind the facade of respectability, in the traditional conservative manner (i.e. ethical egoism), but the conceptualisation of sexuality as a matter of personal hygiene. 

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault traced how that individualist view evolved, via Christian confession, towards an increasing focus on sexuality as a matter of social hygiene and thus a dimension of biopower - i.e. the systematic management and cultivation of the "species body" in the service of capitalism (natalism, public health, pensions etc). Parallel to the increasing regulation of society that starts in the 17th century, we see a growing fascination with sexual deviance and excess as a spillover of the developing philosophy of self-interest: libertinism as the coeval of liberalism (consider the competitive and acquisitive nature of Les Liaisons Dangereuses). As Foucault noted, the nineteenth century was not an era of sexual repression but was instead marked by a shift towards the scientific management of sexuality in both conventional and deviant forms. The hypocrisy associated with the Victorian age was a reflection of the fundamental dichotomy between social norms (how the mass should behave) and personal pleasure (how the elite did behave). 

The sexual licence of the elite is both a historic fact and a powerful myth about the abuse of the vulnerable (consider the persistence of conspiracy theories about secret paedophile cabals). As such, sexuality has a dual political role. Sexual liberation is fundamentally a project of democratic empowerment - each and everyone should be able to pursue their own pleasure, not just the elite - and it is also, in the disproportion of appetite and opportunity, a metaphor for inequality within society. Despite a growing concern with animal cruelty, bestiality sits at a remove from this. Tales of sex with animals tend to be humorous, whether the tone is scurrilous (Catherine the Great) or pitiable (the lonely shpeherd). But they also evoke a deeper memory: gods who take animal form to have sex with humans (Leda and the swan, Europa and the bull) and the transformation of humans into animals as a divine punishment, sometimes for sexual transgression (Actaeon). These tales are not just about breaching taboos but about crossing categorical boundaries. 

The most fundamental boundary in the eyes of the politico-media caste is not between man and beast but between the leaders and the led. It is in the realm of political commentary, starting with Plato's Republic, that we repeatedly encounter the metaphor of the people as a beast that needs to be tamed - a metaphor that dissolves the boundary between human and non-human in service of a critique of democracy ("Would you let a dog vote?"). At all levels of society we explicitly dehumanise people we don't like by calling them beasts, we even employ that metaphor for weather ("Beast from the East") or abstract concepts such a crime, but it is a particular characteristic of the elite to employ bestiality as a reductio ad absurdum. I doubt either Tom Chivers or Hugo Rifkind really want to shag a sheep, but what they are signalling with their formulaic attempt to present an amusing paradox is that they recognise that rules are for the little people, the less than fully human. It is Nietzsche, rather than Foucault, who underpins their moral relativism.