Pride Month and the Infantilization of Society

The advent of Pride Month, albeit in recent years a slightly more muted affair than in the past, is an annual reminder of one of the central aspects of our modern culture. Ours is a culture not merely characterized by the death of old moral values but their intentional and exultant destruction. Anyone who has witnessed a Pride parade can be in no doubt about this. Twice I have unintentionally been in London as the parade takes place; twice my shock at the explicit nature of some of the floats has only been exceeded by my incomprehension at the parents who have brought their tiny children out to watch and cheer. Today, we apparently celebrate neither sexual modesty nor childhood.

Such exultant destruction of things once deemed sacred is a constitutive part of a Western culture that has transformed the rebel into a hero. Rebels need sacred rules to transgress, and as rebellion began to emerge as a heroic ideal in the nineteenth century—at least among the artistic classes—so the religion that upheld those sacred rules was bound to suffer. Matthew Arnold may have captured something of the death of religion with his image of the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the ebbing sea of faith, but it does not capture the ecstatic frenzy and deicide of the sexual revolution. Transgression is fun, exhilarating fun, as thinkers as diverse as Augustine, Nietzsche, and Freud knew only too well. And the glorification of the transgressor is a hallmark of our moment.

Rereading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain recently, I was struck by how the characters’ various ideologies have remained part of the Western cultural landscape a century later. In the rarefied atmosphere of an alpine sanatorium, far above the humdrum lives of ordinary people, elite intellectuals explore modernity’s pathologies and contradictions in ways familiar today. Exclusive humanism and critical theory do battle in the persons of Settembrini and Naphta, a thinly disguised Georg Lukács. Both schools find their supporters today. But the figure who most succinctly captures the wider spirit of our age is Madame Chauchat, the symbol of erotic temptation. She declares to Hans Castorp, the central character: “It seems to us that one ought not to search for morality in virtue, which is to say in reason, in discipline, in good behavior, in respectability—but in just the opposite, I would say: in sin, in abandoning oneself to danger, to whatever can harm us, destroy us.” 

Transgression—in this case, the tease of erotic transgression—is the hallmark of the “virtuous,” or perhaps better “authentic,” person. That is the logic of the sexual revolution that has done so much to reshape Western culture in the last sixty years, and of which Pride Month is the liturgical celebration.

In the century since Mann wrote, the basic ideas he was exploring have not changed.  Postmodernity really is not that different from modernity. What has changed is the scope and location of these ideas. No longer do they only inform the entertaining conversations of those living on the cultural mountaintops. Now they are the common property of the culture at all levels, enabled both by technology and the media. Medicine has made chaotic sexual behavior less risky. Chauchat’s transgression is today cheap and easily available in the over-the-counter forms of the abortion pill and antibiotics. And social media has extended adolescence by incentivizing increasingly transgressive behavior. To keep those clicks coming, we must become ever more outrageous. Indeed, this turbocharges one of the essential dynamics of transgression as an ideal: Once a specific transgression is normalized, it too must be transgressed. The hunger is never satisfied; it only becomes more extreme. And so, while rebellion in the 1970s was having a poster of the Sex Pistols on your bedroom wall or telling your horrified mother that Debbie Harry was your ideal date, today it’s proclaiming on X or Instagram that Hitler was one of the good guys and queer people should support Hamas. 

There is something infantile about rebellion and transgression. The need to perform and draw attention to oneself by constantly overthrowing and despising anything considered valuable or sacred by a previous generation has a rather Oedipal ring to it. Growing up used to be about learning and internalizing the values of the past in order to take one’s place in society. But a society built around transgression is really a society committed to a permanent state of immaturity. Whether it’s activists or social media users upping the rhetorical ante by insulting anyone they disagree with and demanding public affirmation of what is obviously false—that men can be women and vice versa—or whether it’s the ever-more outlandish sexualities on display in pop culture, the dynamic is the same: public discourse degenerating into infantile tantrums.

Which brings us back to Pride Month. Exhibitionism and glorying in transgressive sexuality and in the inability or unwillingness to exert self-control is the mark of an infantile society. No, children shouldn’t be taken to Pride parades. But we fool ourselves if we think that such parades are not themselves deeply childish affairs.