The New Benefit of Clergy

On November 9, Russell Brand was sentenced to over ten years in prison for one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault, while David Walliams has been accused of sexual assault and grooming following a years-long investigation by The Guardian and ITV News. The downfalls of these British comedians once again highlight both the cultural establishment’s complicity in allowing its own kind to indulge in evil behavior and the contradictions at the heart of the sexual revolution. The gold standard of celebrity complicity was set by those who campaigned to spare child rapist Roman Polanski extradition to the United States. (Who can forget Whoopi Goldberg’s attempt to distinguish between types of rape?) At least the enablers of Brand and Walliams were quick to distance themselves from their former friends once the game was up.

Reviewing the autobiography of Salvador Dalí, George Orwell asked why moral monsters like the Spanish surrealist were granted immunity from accepted moral standards. His answer was that artists enjoy “benefit of clergy”—the medieval practice of granting clergymen accused of crimes the right to be tried in church courts, where penalties were considerably lighter than those faced by ordinary villains. The same holds true today. We grant our modern holy men, the artists and entertainers, a similar privilege, though we have lowered the talent bar since Dalí: Brand and Walliams were nothing more than tasteless comedians whose comic contributions (Walliams in blackface; Brand joking about choking women during sex acts) had become unacceptable long before their public downfalls. At least Dalí left paintings that were technically brilliant and still have the power to grip the imagination. His art has outlived him. Brand and Walliams have long outlived their contributions. 

All of this is consistent with Philip Rieff’s prophetic analysis of cultural change as society shifted to making personal happiness the goal of life. He argued that the family and the church would decline because both demand a sacrifice of the self. The medical and entertainment industries, meanwhile, would flourish because they alleviate pain and boredom. A new set of holy men would emerge: the entertainers who defined themselves by trampling on all that was once considered sacred. Cultural elites would thereby invert their traditional function, no longer transmitting values from one generation to the next but dismantling them. Benefit of clergy today applies to the iconoclasts—sexual, political (on both sides of the aisle), and otherwise.

That Brand was embraced by the left establishment in the U.K. during the 2010s, before his turn to the right, should be no surprise. Of course, that was not the old left of George Orwell but the new left of Owen Jones, Ed Miliband, and even now–prime minister Andy Burnham, all of whom have been embarrassed by his downfall. Brand’s despicable treatment of women is not something that emerged in court over the last few weeks. It was his trademark; he became a star by lewdly boasting of his conquests. It seems that for those eager for a photo opportunity with him, his obvious and well-known misogyny was but a light, momentary offense compared to the revolutionary glory that was to come.

And the world shaped by the sexual revolution allowed him to prosper for a time. The revolution promised liberation. Turn sex from an act so significant that it belonged only within marriage—that most sacred of relationships marked by lifelong commitment, fidelity, and self-sacrifice—into mere recreation, and we would be free. To borrow a phrase from Shulamith Firestone, the tyranny of the biological family would be broken. But over time, it has become clear that the sexual revolution favors men and turns women into lumps of sexualized meat. Pornography is only the most extreme example of its logic.  

Every now and then, cultural tastes change or the law intervenes, and the great and the good claim: “If only we had known.” Well, many of us have known all along.

The left’s erstwhile infatuation with Brand is a feature, not a bug, of the present political anti-culture. Iconoclasm is its mood, and celebrities are its clergy. The same applies on the right—Donald Trump’s rise is unimaginable without the sexual revolution and the celebrity culture of our time—but it is perhaps more shocking to see the left granting benefit of clergy to the likes of Brand, given its professed championing of feminism and women’s rights. As feminist writer Julie Bindel puts it:

I am sometimes challenged, usually by women on the left, about why I reserve most of my anger for leftist men. My answer is straightforward: rank hypocrisy. They posture and present themselves as great friends of feminists who speak of right-wing men as the enemy—and against women’s rights. With those right-wing men who are against women’s progress or equality, you know where you stand. But so-called progressive men, supporting grotesquely abusive and exploitative capitalist industries such as prostitution and surrogacy, cannot have their cake and eat it. They need to be named and shamed as the sexists that they are. 

Amen.

Brand, of course, professes Christianity. Time will tell if his conversion is genuine and has deep roots. Hopefully he will find a good chaplain in prison who can help him accept his sentence as just and appropriate. Whether Walliams will face any legal consequences remains to be seen. What is clear is that both men acted as agents of the sexual revolution, both revealed its internal contradictions (and its human cost), and both exposed the craven complicity of the cultural elites in their behavior. It is doubtful that the latter will change. With elites committed to anti-cultural iconoclasm and the constant overthrow of whatever happens to be the norm, it is only a matter of time before we have our intelligence insulted by the next scandal and the next round of hasty claims of ignorance from those who knew only too well with whom they had been consorting.

Image by Raph_PH via Creative Commons. Image cropped.