The breathless tributes to David Hockney’s ‘peaceful, gay paradise’ painted during an era when homosexuality was a crime are a testament to how far we have sunk in our capacity for genuine moral reflection. Hockney, a titan of British art, indeed rendered tender, sun-drenched scenes of male intimacy at a time when such love was punishable by law. The gloss of progressive triumph that now coats these works obscures a deeper, more uncomfortable truth: our celebration of Hockney is not a sign of societal maturity but of a decadent age that mistakes legal reform for virtue.
We are told to laud the UK’s social progress, to clap ourselves on the back for evolving beyond the cruel laws of the 1960s. But what of the spiritual vacuum this progress has left? The Victorians, for all their prudishness, understood that civilisation required restraint, a framework of shared morality that held back the barbarians at the gate. They would look upon our era not with envy but with horror. We have traded a society that punished deviation for one that punishes anyone who dares to question the new orthodoxy.
Hockney’s paintings are beautiful, yes, but they are also a product of their time, a rebellion against a repressive system. Today, rebellion is impossible. Our culture demands conformity to a new set of rigid dogmas: that all forms of desire are equal, that the past was irredeemably bigoted, that the present is a utopia. We celebrate Hockney’s courage while ignoring that our own age has no room for the kind of iconoclasm he represented. He broke taboos; we worship taboos. He was a contrarian; we are a chorus of yes-men.
This is not progress. This is the final stage of intellectual decadence, where we confuse legal permissions with moral wisdom. The Romans did not fall because they suppressed homosexuality; they fell because they forgot what virtue meant. We are repeating their mistake, but on a grander scale. Hockney’s paradise, viewed through the lens of our self-congratulation, becomes a gilded cage of our own making. We have won the legal battle, but we have lost the war for the soul.
In truth, the UK now suffers from a poverty of imagination. We cannot conceive of a society where honour, duty, and sacrifice still matter. Instead, we exalt the artist who defied a law, forgetting that the law itself, however harsh, was part of a broader moral ecosystem that gave life meaning. Hockney’s paintings are a reminder of what we have surrendered: the tension between desire and duty, the very friction that produces great art and great nations. Our flat, sanitised, ‘inclusive’ culture produces nothing but banal affirmations.
So by all means, admire Hockney’s technical brilliance and his audacity. But spare me the smugness. The real story is not how far we have come, but how much we have lost. We are not the inheritors of a great liberal tradition; we are its gravediggers, burying the past beneath a monument of self-regard.
