Dear Oscar,

Is there room for dissent?

I am asking because it seems to me that the position your adopted was one of dissent; you did not agree with the overriding moral assumptions of your age, and you made that known. Or, at least, you put forward a different moral spectrum, harking back to the assumed societies of the Ancients, in opposition to the moral trajectory of your own age.

It was not well received, as we now know; and you paid a heavy price for insisting that your point of view should outweigh the feeling of your age. It leads me to wonder if that is the total capacity for dissent. There is some room within a free society (or one that calls itself ‘free’) for the voicing of views that go against the common trend, for them to be made known to some degree, for them to be heard, but it is through the course of history, beyond the interventions of any interlocutor, that opinion is changed, raising the dissenting voice to one that has influence. You spoke very eloquently about what you termed ‘Greek love’, that which exists between an older, educated, trusted male, and younger acolytes requiring teaching and instruction, and I am sure that in many respects you have a fair point. Of course it is the case that the younger learn from their elders, that a view of the world is formulated alongside, or even in opposition to, dominant tropes put forward by those who have lived the longest, but we know, Oscar, that your form of education went a little further. Your form of education did involve some level of exploitation, buying and selling, trading one thing for another. So it does have to be said, I think, that when the voices of the elders are essentially corrupting and are putting forward messages that are not really of benefit to humankind, then they do have to come under question. Which in some circuitous route does lead me back to the notion of dissent.

It is very difficult to argue that you were right in your views, but just as difficult to argue that you were wrong. Depending upon the stance taken either position would have been one of dissent, although I suppose arguing for ‘Greek love’ did fly in the face of the vast majority of opinions held at the time, and in your particular society, and so it would seem that that was where the dissent actually lay. It is not necessarily where the dissent would lie today. There are those who argue vehemently that free sexual expression across all sexes and genders, inter-generational and socially proscribed, is to be encouraged, promoted, and entered into the statutes of legal frameworks as characteristics that are protected. These arguments see the historical age itself as voicing a dissent to the current dominant order, hiding behind the archaic and the out of date to persecute freedoms expected. So that dissent shifts, and as such is policed, shut down, countered in a cultural warfare that allows some things to be said, and some things to be muted, misrepresented, marginalised.

There must be a common ground. Beneath all of the positions held and assertions made, the learned rhetoric and adherence to beliefs, there has to be some measure of common ground; some argument that says: ‘This is best for humanity, really is, truly allows freedom with consideration of others, recognising all of our needs, all of our honest desires.’

Goodness knows, Oscar, why such questions preoccupy me; I want to find for you some understanding.

Your friend,

Algernon B. Duffoure.