‘I t was with a sense of grey despair that I read of a young father in England, being forbidden, by some politically constipated magistrate, either to live in his home or to see his son for six months. Daddy had — in my opinion, quite rightly — given his son a smart couple of smacks on his backside when the boy tried walking in front of a moving car. ‘You will live apart from your family until your trial in six months time,’ snarled the outraged beak. ‘What is more, in the interim you will only be allowed to visit your son in the company of an approved third person.”’
Justifying their action in arresting the man, police officials said that ”the level of force used was over and above what is necessary to discipline a child”.
I wrote the above in this column about 10 weeks ago, wondering what criteria were used by the 18-year-old constable who decided that the two smacks were excessive, and arrested the dad. In the nanny state that England has become, this sort of meddling in private lives and behaviour is increasingly common.
In New Labour’s climate of tolerance-at-any-cost, it is believed that pernicious delinquents should be treated with respect and sensitivity. So, when a group of booze-enraged soccer louts savagely beat up an innocent passer-by, they don’t get to spend any time in prison. Instead, they are sentenced to compulsory attendance at a set of ”counselling” sessions where government-employed psychologists explain patiently to the soccer louts how unpleasant and antisocial they’ve been. After the sessions are over, the louts are free to go back to their pillaging, but now better informed as to what abhorrent shitheads they are. They are regarded as having been tamed to some degree.
It’s bad enough to see this sort of punitive mockery used to exculpate people who should be punished with appropriate severity. When it is used to chasten someone like the father who smacked his child, it confirms the impression that a new branch of law enforcement has been established: Emotion Police — a term now gaining currency in England.
And it’s not only in England. The Emotion Police are at work elsewhere. So-called ”anger management”, an American fabrication, is becoming a fashionable tool for judicial reformers. There’s also ”grief counselling”, an offshoot of the insurance and airline industries by which they ”manage” the anguish of those whose relatives have been killed in air accidents. (Their pain and loss professionally assuaged, the relatives tend to sue for less.)
Among the primary objectives of the Emotion Police is the inhibition of human affections. The vigorous ebb and flow of temperaments are anathema to those who would have a world that is manageable: no peaks of ecstasy, no valleys of sorrow, no fury, no limitless joy. A world where it is considered excessive to love anybody or any music or art or writing to the point of distraction. Better to mildly approve. Above all, a world where laughter has to be controlled.
It is a modification of censorship, this time not aimed at controlling what we say or read, but censorship devised to cripple the soul; to which cunning art a brand new restricting medium is now being added. It will be a boon to the Emotion Police. It’s called Neurodex and is being marketed by the company Avanir Pharmaceuticals in California.
Neurodex constrains what is termed ”uncontrollable laughing or crying”, with the legally cautious rider that the drug is intended for use only in cases where the uncontrollable laughing or crying is as a result of disease or injury. Avanir’s critics are voluble and all make a similar point: what has happened is that, having invented the drug, Avanir needed to invent a disease that the drug would cure. They call this new disease ”pathologic [sic] laughter or crying”.
There’s no space here to reveal in any detail the arguments for and against Neurodex, except to note that they are polarised. The most interesting and sinister comment was made by Avanir’s CEO, a man with the Milliganesque name of Dr Gerald J Yakatan. He says that a potential market lies in the use of the drug for — wait for it — anger management. He didn’t add the obvious, that Neurodex could also be used to control the intemperate weeping following an airline accident. If Neurodex is only for genuine medical disorders, its market will be minimal. Some other uses must be found. Who’s to say where pathology ends and commercial gain begins.
At what stage does crying or laughter become pathological? I’ve been to funerals where my need to burst out laughing was almost uncontrollable. It’s weddings that make me cry. But I don’t think I need some drug when a top rate stand-up comedian reduces me to apoplexy.
But it’s a given that some English magistrate, faced with a father who smacked his son because he nearly walked under a car, will hand down a sentence of a six-month course of Neurodex. Remember the super-tranquiliser, Soma, used in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to keep the citizens happy and under control. ”You look glum, You need a gramme of Soma.” Or is that Neurodex?