A further step towards the abyss as govvernment polices private intimacy
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It is the lovers – in their simple, joyful exchange of private beauty, ‘with their arms round the griefs of the ages’ – that keep us all sane and connected to something permanent and strong in the human heart.’
In his 1988 album ‘I’m Your Man’, the poet and singer Leonard Cohen sings these words on a track called ‘Everybody Knows’:
‘And everybody knows that the Plague is coming
Everybody knows that it’s moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artefact of the past
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But there’s gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows…’
This verse has more relevance to our current predicament than the ironic reference to a plague. The lines, ‘Everybody knows that the naked man and woman/Are just a shining artefact of the past…’ are chillingly prescient given the government’s new amendment to the Coronavirus legislation, which says that, among other things, sex with someone outside of your own home is illegal, and that both parties can now be charged. The droll lines of Cohen’s – ‘…there’s gonna be a meter on your bed/That will disclose/What everybody knows…’ – is now also hilariously accurate.
As pubs start to produce takeaway draft lagers, BBQs become okay in the eyes of the police and middle class, and performative narcissists act like they are ’68 civil rights activists by gathering in irritating crowds, we could be fooled into thinking that the lockdown laws are now only symbolic, that the government is allowing the citizenry to choose its own destiny, and that each individual is now being quietly nudged to rely on their own discretion. However, this new amendment to an already worrying set of powers marks the single most sinister, far-reaching, and potentially devastating encroachment on our civil liberties.
At this late stage of an already oppressive and suffocating lockdown, to start policing people’s private lives and to make honest, natural and instinctive human intimacy a matter of restrictive law, is unprecedented.
Freedom is determined by the extent to which we are allowed to be individuals and to make individual choices, and individuality is determined by agency. The long-fought-for rights of free expression, free speech and freedom of association were so precious to our forebears who struggled for them precisely because they knew that in the power to exercise agency over our bodies lies the power to claim our own humanity.
While social conservatives continue to make persuasive cases against abortion rights, the debate is a live one exactly because it goes right to the heart of the complexities around the question of where human agency begins and ends, and where my right to use my own body comes into friction with another person’s right to life. If we did not value the right of an individual to exercise individual discretion over their body, these difficult and fiery discussions would have been settled long ago.
However, it is not just in the arena of material agency that this new amendment shows its egregious overreach. To police love, to monitor intimacy and make government decrees on the silent glories of private passion is as much an attack on the human soul as it is on individual bodies.
Our tradition of romantic love is a robust legacy that incorporates medieval chivalric knights, Renaissance sonneteers, the Provencal troubadours and the witty epigrams of Catullus. It is found in the heated yearnings of Sappho, the biblical Song of Songs and the highly-wrought lyrical power of John Donne. What all these poets and singers were celebrating was the powerful, emancipating and agency-enriching force of human love. In the western tradition, human love, freely exercised, is a critical component of the formation of the self; it is the very means by which we forge our souls in the world of sense and form.
This tradition of love as a catalyst for the human soul takes us back to Plato, who in The Symposium, and in Phaedrus, argued that love’s ultimate aim was Beauty, and that Beauty was the closest thing human beings could have to an experience of the divine. This tradition is not a mere relishing of tawdry trysts. It’s not a matter of sexual abandon. The romantic tradition that begins with Plato is one that recognises the sacredness of human love. It is the same tradition that Dylan Thomas was writing in when he wrote:
‘Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.’
One of the most reassuring experiences during the lockdown has been to walk around city parks and to see couples sitting in the evening sun, or hiding beneath shadowed boughs, exchanging stolen kisses in the uncertain quiet. This sight brings us back to first principles, to the primal immediacy of what really matters in the human experience.
As we all grapple with the horrifying anxiety of where the economy is going, how our society will return to normal and how long we are to be held in captivity for despite the peak of this virus passing weeks ago, it is the lovers – in their simple, joyful exchange of private beauty, ‘with their arms round the griefs of the ages’ – that keep us all sane and connected to something permanent and strong in the human heart.
We have already had the insult of witnessing Imperial College’s Professor Neil Ferguson and Labour MP Rosie Duffield have to resign for both being hypocrites on the matter of sexuality and lockdown. To bring in this new amendment now makes normal people who have sought to be law-abiding and considerate feel like they are being laughed at by those who rule them.
To contrast his bleak, apocalyptic prophecy in ‘Everybody Knows’, Leonard Cohen later wrote in his populist anthem ‘Democracy’, these heartening words:
‘It’s coming from the women and the men
O baby, we’ll be making love again
We’ll be going down so deep
The river’s going to weep,
And the mountain’s going to shout Amen
It’s coming like the tidal flood
Beneath the lunar sway
Imperial, mysterious
In amorous array
Democracy is coming to the USA.’
This could have been written about modern Britain. This country is free precisely because citizens get to choose who they love and how they love. This added restriction is a direct attack on common sense and our tradition of liberty.
The government should be warned: this is a step too far, and a free people will put up with such crazed, philistine incursions on their souls for only so long.
