Taboos. Remember them? They were things our society used to have. It’s true that some of them can look fairly silly in retrospect. I know a wee boy who did that and his eyes stayed that way. If you do that, you’ll go blind.

When there are no taboos, society's foundations begin to crumble

Their dark wisdom was never explained. ‘Keep your hand on your ha’penny’. ‘Don’t ever speak to your mother like that’. They were simply passed down to you by your elders like tribal law, extracts from some oral manual for living. How they had been arrived at was lost somewhere in the mysterious past, dead voices speaking: ‘Respect your elders. The man will check you’.

Not now he won’t, it seems. I noticed a picture on the front page of the Daily Star last week on a news stand. It was captioned: ‘Essex wife Jodie shows her class’. It gave us the aforementioned Jodie standing with a grinning man who was pulling up her very short skirt. She was smiling delightedly for the camera. What she was showing was her backside in a G-string. This is class? Showing your bum in public is no longer forbidden, apparently. All right, it’s hardly the end of civilisation as we know it but a little more of the dark, primal force is drained from the Tongan word Captain Cook brought back with him from his travels.

Taboos. Who needs them anyway? A taboo is an acquired characteristic, the experience of the tribe turned into that peculiarly human paradox: a learned instinct. It is something worse than illegal. It suggests something that is a crime against the forces of life, a forbidden act which, if you perform it, will leave you outcast in some way not just from society but from nature itself.

‘Taboos made life mysterious and our awareness of the mysteriousness of life gave us a respect for it’

I can understand the impulse for breaking taboos. But, as we do it, we should remember what was important about them. They taught us, beyond their apparent immediate irrelevance, an attitude to experience. They made life mysterious and our awareness of the mysteriousness of life gave us a respect for it. But that kind of respect is largely dependent on agreed attitudes that gave rise to the taboos in the first place. When those agreed attitudes are lost, as seems widely to be the case in contemporary society, the sense of what is forbidden is lost as well. When the small taboos are broken, the foundation they gave to the bigger taboos crumbles.

Last week’s Scotland on Sunday carried a news story by Kizzy Taylor which made me wonder where the death of taboos has brought us. It told of the increasing incidence of children beating up their mothers. One victim spoke of her 12-year-old son’s first attack: "It was very painful. Eventually his frenzy wore itself out. I was covered in bruises, but I was so shocked I didn’t feel it at first. I assumed it was a one-off outburst, but I was so wrong. My beautiful baby boy had turned into a 6ft bully, who swore in my face, trashed our home and came at me with anything that was to hand. I knew he was hurting inside and that he felt insecure but it didn’t make it any easier to control."

Where are we? This woman’s experience is apparently far from unique. It is becoming steadily more common. Organisations such as Parentline Scotland and Tulip (Together United Living in Peace) are helping serious numbers of parents who have been abused by their children — and the victims are men as well as women. The perpetrators are girls as well as boys. The standard initial response from parents who find they have been rearing an aggressive fifth column in their own house seems to be one of guilt. They blame themselves for failing their children. Given the increasing frequency of this phenomenon across disparate social groups, I think we have to use a wider lens to get any kind of just perspective on the causes. Parenting is to a large extent a process of mediation between the anarchic impulses of the child and the established values of the society in which he or she is growing up. For that parenting to be effective, therefore, it has to have a clear sense of what those values are.

Our present culture provides no such clarity of vision. It offers no consistent set of values to which parents can relate, no universally accepted network of assumptions by which one family is significantly connected to another. Such principles as we have are a pick’n’mix of vaguely liberal attitudes. Serve yourself. The result is that there is no remotely authoritative guidance on how we should live within society.

In fact, authority itself, no matter how much accrued experience it may be based on, has become a discredited concept. Last week the Fife branch of the Scottish Secondary Teachers’ Association published a report which indicated the contemptuous and contemptible treatment to which teachers can be subjected these days. Sexually motivated abuse is commonplace. The district secretary of the Fife branch, Margaret Smith, made this comment: "The threat of rape is pretty rare but it is not at all unusual for sexual comments to be made to female staff. It’s a frightening picture."

It is a dangerously disorientated culture where pupils abuse their teachers and children chastise their parents and parents have taken to hiring coaches to teach them how to bring up a family. What had been thought of as immemorial certitudes are atomising all around us. In place of what we thought was the gathered wisdom of the past, we have constantly changing theories to intimidate us even further out of our instincts. If the trend continues as it’s going, we may soon be taking lessons not just in how to be parents but in how to be people.

The changing nature of the times is often cited as the reason for the confusion of contemporary society, with reference to factors like the fragmentation of the extended family and the subversive influence of the electronic media. These no doubt play a part, but I think we underestimate the extent to which contemporary thought has been quite willfully making society over into its own dishevelled image. The Victorians had humanism, which at least gave its society coherent meaning, one which was dynamic with belief in values like social progress. We have post-modernism, which admits of no values which are not relative. It is western thought performing a postmortem on its own significance, suicide by autopsy.

Organisations such as Parentline and Tulip may validly help individual families. But the root of the malaise is beyond their reach. It lies in the fact that a society like ours disinherits its youth from the humanly meaningful fulfilment of themselves. It cheapens their dreams and narrows their potential. It turns teenage rebellion into no more than a self-lacerating tantrum. At least taboos suggested a meaning in things, however obscure. People who attack the source of their being are in effect vandalising their own lives, perhaps because they see no meaningful purpose to which they can be put.

By Willaim McIlvanney
11 June 2003

http://news.scotsman.com/columnists.cfm?id=635432003

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