Attacking the Wrong Degenerates

‘Degenerate’ is one of my favourite words.  It’s a full-frontal attack on the post-modern celebration of base vulgarity, its erudition assaults  semi-literate sensibilities, and implicit in the term are demands for moral standards to separate the wheat from the chaff.  It’s the perfect word for denouncing the ills of our times… which is why I hate seeing it come out of the mouths of the callow self-righteous.

Never has degeneracy been simultaneously so flagrant, and so prosaic, as it is today.  On the one hand we have other-kin dressing in fur-suits and masturbating to cannibal porn; nothing more needs be said about these creatures, they’re voiding their bowels in public for all to see.  It’s the prosaics who truly frustrate me; the milquetoast moral majority; the squares, the chumps, the cowards.  Those who snootily look down their nose on anybody who lives with an ounce of passion, while patting themselves on the back for the blameless mediocrity that is their lives.

These are the worst degenerates of them all.

Good men who seek after greatness, both personal and professional, are the ones who are most aware of their own shortcomings.  They’re the ones who over-extend themselves, whose reach exceeds their grasp in their never-ending journey of self-improvement.  Their life is a series of mistakes made for all the right reasons, mistakes they take ownership of, the mistakes by which they learn.  Their esteem is hard to earn, but so is their condemnation.  Having been through the crucible, they know perfectly well how frail the human spirit is, how fallible a man can be.  We are all sinners, after all; it’s the good man who has eyes to see the difference between the venal and the mortal.

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Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was one of London’s most brilliant writers, whose works continue to receive praise even today.  He was a flamboyant, larger-than-life figure; in 1883, upon arriving in New York and being asked by a customs official if he had anything to declare, he is alleged to have answered “I have nothing to declare except my genius!” His novel, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, scandalized British censors by depicting a man who sells his soul to live a life of hedonistic sensualism; the weight of his corruption transfers onto the portrait of him which started the whole affair, destroying the permanent beauty of a painting for short-term, forgettable pleasure.  In the end, he receives the wages of his sins: death.  His short-story The Selfish Giant is a meditation upon masculinity, and the necessity of sharing your love with the world.  It is about how isolation leads to spiritual death, and how fatherhood is the most rewarding experience a man can enjoy.

“My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.”
~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

He was also a bisexual faggot, sentenced to prison for acts of gross indecency with other men, who spent his last three years of life exiled on the continent, longing for his estranged wife and sons, while doting upon, and beloved by, the children of the innkeepers where he was staying.

So what say you, gentle reader?  Was Oscar Wilde a corrupting degenerate, whose books deserve to be trampled, his grave left to dust and ruin, his punishment proof of a just legal system?  Or was he a genius beset by the madness that afflicts all great minds, dragged down by the banal and envious degenerates of a civil society which preferred moral pretense to moral action?

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The weight of moral decisions have an additive effect in a person’s life, but the weight of any one decision is an internal affair; the sin itself doesn’t lend itself to quantifiable measurements.  From the outside it matters not whether a man’s sins appear great or small; that tells you very little about him.  The important questions is why did the person sin – was it out of hate?  Or out of love?

One man may be so placed that his anger sheds the blood of thousands, and another so placed that however angry he gets he will only be laughed at. But the little mark on the soul may be much the same in both. Each has done something to himself which, unless he repents, will make it harder for him to keep out of the rage next time he is tempted, and will make the rage worse when he does fall into it. Each of them, if he seriously turns to God, can have that twist in the central man straightened out again: each is, in the long run, doomed if he will not. The bigness or smallness of the thing, seen from the outside, is not what really matters.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

The true measure of a man must be taken holistically; what sort of fruits does his tree bear?  A weak man who perpetually rages, or a temperate man who ridicules drunkards, will never have to worry about prison in the same way that a strong man or a drunkard does; but while the latters might eventually wind up incarcerated for their mistakes, if they’ve tried to live as good men they’ll nonetheless find themselves surrounded by love, and remembered in fondness.  The weak and the temperate who set no standards for themselves, who are happy merely avoiding prison, are liable to wind up alone in the end, their lives a dead and dried out garden, forgotten by history.

Wilde suffered as all men suffered, some of it the consequences of his own intemperance, some of it the petty hatred of the mediocre; in the end, though, he was loved and remembered by those who shared his life, and his works went on to share beauty with the world.  He was a sinner like the rest of us – but he lived like a man!

As for me, I will always choose the company of freaks and weirdos who pursue greatness, who endeavour to treat others well, whose lives are – granted – a series of ridiculous mistakes, but who own the mistakes and are honest about themselves.  It may not have the noble shine of hidden hypocrisy that mediocre minds embody, but I would rather be judged for breaking bread with punks and misfits than stabbed in the back by men who think highly of themselves.

Moral standards are an internal affair; they’re the standards we set for ourselves.  One man’s gravy can be another man’s poison, and judging others for their short-comings is just another form of jealousy; envy at how easy they have it.  It comes from those who have never struggled against their personal demons, but who have instead laid down and taken the easy path in life, and that’s no sort of life at all.

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.
~C.S. Lewis,