Thought For The Day: The New Normal

A gay friend once told me he preferred it in the old days, when being “other” was transgressive and interesting, when it represented a real counterculture. No one wants to go back to the time when homosexuality was so strongly stigmatised that it forced countercultures to generate in defiance. But I know what he meant.

Soft social liberalism – embraced, nominally at least, by the Cameronian Tories – is now so widespread that difference, in a strange way, is disappearing (although admittedly some of the LGT children were bullied because of their difference). But the rainbow society, where pretty much anything is acceptable, is getting closer every day.

Who can say that this is a bad thing? However, I have a faint nostalgia for difference – of rebellion, if you like. In a world where everyone is accepted, individuality itself in some strange way is diluted, because where everyone is an individual, no one is an individual. Heterogeneity becomes a form of homogeneity.

I sometimes think that children and adolescents have lost the ability to shock – at least in interesting cultural ways, rather than by violence or bad behaviour. Yes, we all accept difference now as normal. But that might be another way of saying that difference is dead. There’s much to celebrate about that – but also, perhaps, something to mourn.

Tim Lott: The Guardian.