Taboos, not Tattoos

Tattoos are a sign of civilization's end, says Theodore Dalrymple (aka Anthony Daniels) who, while not quite advocating a legal proscription, still makes the aesthetic, psychological, and cultural case against them as follows:

First, it was aesthetically worse than worthless. Tattoos were always kitsch, implying not only the absence of taste but the presence of dishonest emotion.

Second, the vogue represented a desperate (and rather sad) attempt on a mass scale to achieve individuality and character by means of mere adornment, which implied both intellectual vacuity and unhealthy self-absorption.

And third, it represented mass downward cultural and social aspiration, since everyone understood that tattooing had a traditional association with low social class and, above all, with aggression and criminality. It was, in effect, a visible symbol of the greatest, though totally ersatz, virtue of our time: an inclusive unwillingness to make judgments of morality or value.

In sum, tattoos are tasteless, indulgent, and aggressive (if not quite criminal). Corresponding to these three familiar arguments are the three classic types that embody them: the philistine, the narcissist, and the lout, respectively, all of whom would appear to be in acendancy in the Western world today. Uncoincidentally, these are also Dalrymple's usual suspects for civilization's decline. How convenient that they're tattooed for identification.

The problem, as Dalrymple soon discovers when queried on the subject by a Dutch interlocutor, is that while his arguments may (or may not—I, like the Dutch, make no judgements of morality or value here) be aesthetically, intellectually, psychologically, culturally, and morally dispositive, the legal case is the only one that really matters, and only barely at that. For in the absence of any social or moral authority such as may have been provided by Church and Custom, all human activity is increasingly judged solely from the viewpoint of the Law, a state of affairs that outrages Dalrymple when his interviewer draws it to his attention:

But the correspondent’s premise that the legality of an act was the sole criterion by which one could or should judge it chilled me. It is a sinister premise. It makes the legislature the complete arbiter of manners and morals, and thus accords to the state quasi-totalitarian powers without the state’s ever having claimed them. The state alone decides what we have or lack permission to do: we have to make no moral decisions for ourselves, for what we have legal permission to do is also, by definition, morally acceptable.

If one cannot legislate morality, then morality, in the absence of any other authority, must go the way of other quaint beliefs, such as those in God and progress, and end up as mere superstition, which is where many assume it began life in the first place. To reconfer upon Superstition the full powers and authority of the Law, without actually making it written law, is the difficult task that lies before those who would try to reverse this trajectory of long moral decline.

What Dalrymple laments in fact is the absence of taboo, another word of Polynesian origin that has entered the Western lexicon by the hand of James Cook. If modern Western youth have appropriated for themselves the tribal body-adornment of primitive societies, they have ignored or discounted its religio-ritual context. In other words, they've freely adopted the profane while rejecting everything sacred.

What is lacking today is a universal source of awe and fear, whether this source be a monotheistic God or, what may amount to the same according to Georges Bataille, exposed female genitalia or other magical, pre-rationalist forces.

Until then, the droves of philistines, narcissists and louts will continue to uphold our new, or neo-primitivist, tradition of indulgence without limit, tattoos without taboos.