Helmintholog

There was a glorious story in an Australian-owned tabloid about two teachers meeting in Queensland, where brothels have just been legalised. One of them had gone as a customer; the other was working there in her spare time.

I don’t know how the story got out. The woman was “counselled”, but could not be sacked, and neither could the man. The anti-discrimination commissioner has announced that it would be illegal if either of them were to be sacked for engaging in sexual activity which is perfectly legal in itself. This seems to me to miss some important points about teaching, and the difficulties of maintaining classroom discipline if one’s hobbies are unusual.

Anyway, I was thinking about the moral issues involved, for a worm’s eye column, and realised that there are two grounds on which legalised prostitution can be defended. In a slave-owning society, or even on where women have no rights, then it is none of the state’s business what happens to a slave. In a free society, individual consenting adults may into transactions with each other, and that’s none of the state’s business either.

The trouble with prostitution in modern societies is that as a matter fact it involves both free and slave labour. I have no idea whether Belle du Jour was real, but I’m pretty certain Tracy Quan was. Both of them qualify as free agents. There must be others like them. Somehow this makes the slavery aspects even worse.

It still seems entirely wrong that only one side of the deal should be criminalised, but whether both or neither should be is less clear. What’s obvious when you think about it, though, is that slavery should be treated as murder, punished with mandatory life imprisonment, and investigated with as many resources as a murder is.

Next month. I’m making an Analysis programme for Radio Four on the way that Americans tend to believe that history must have an architect or at least a meaning. This seemed more interesting to everyone that yet another go-around on ID, which is a subset of this whig interpretation of the universe.

The difficulty, of course, is to stop this coming over as yet another tour around the psyche of those wacky yet curiously unlovable people across the pond. I want to get over the immediate, allergic reaction that educated English people have when God comes into the conversation of an American. There are ways to fool the immune system. It’s all right if it’s set to music: no one minds Emmylou Harris. But we can’t have her. So I am trying to come up with thoughtful, fluent, sympathetic American voices who can get this kind of discussion past the listeners’ immune systems. Obviously,. I have my own list, and will be asking for suggestions privately. But if anyone has ideas here, please comment away.

I just had a letter from Mary Kenny which seems to illustrate perfectly the gap between evolutionary and cultural explanations of human benevolence. She’s an old friend, and a thoroughly decent person, so I like arguing with her because I know her heart is as pure as her reasoning is sometimes tangled. Anyway, she read my Gintis piece in Saturday’s Guardian and wrote back as follows:

Andrew dear since you took me to task about faith and evolution, let me respond to you about Norway: there is a hateful side to this Scandinavian ³openness²: enforced levelling which comes under the pharisaical heading of ³equality² (you are not even allowed to have a personal tombstone in a graveyard it has to be chosen by the local authority, who oversees that they are all the exact same height), and what amounts to state control of private life (the Government knows exactly how much you drink). It is all bound up with their particular type of Calvinism. Not that there isn¹t a genial side to the Norwegians I know there is (and they seem to take great pride in telling you that they are, fundamentally, much nicer than those stuck-up Swedes): but give me a bit of privacy, and personal quirkiness in my private life, please. I¹d much rather see people fight to minimise their taxes, in an (evolutionary?) tussle with the State – and retain their individuality.

If my ancestors were kind and charitable (and many of them were), it was because they believed their reward would be in heaven. And I notice among the yobs of East Kent, and there are many, those who have no such belief are very noticeably unkind and uncharitable, as described in the latest Lynne Truss oeuvre…Love, Mary

So I wrote back. I want to write more and more thoughtfully about this, but my first reactions are below the fold, as a place-holder …

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