FREDERICK CREWS’S “FOLLIES OF THE WISE”

I made the time to read this book*, a collection of essays by a former Freudian psychoanalyst who came to see through the many deep problems with Freud’s methods and his (often changed) ideas.

Crews is by nature and temperament a skeptic, but after a while he realized that Freud’s skeptical approach to the human psychology was actually based not on careful clinical research and – to use a legal term - the rules of evidence that scientists are supposed to adhere to. Rather, Freud passed off his own insights as ‘research’, insisted that they were beyond doubt, and required his students and followers to accept them without question, thereby creating both a pseudoscience and a cult.

Again, looking to deepen the SO community’s grasp of just where the SO mania and its laws have come from, I’m going to discuss some of the thoughts Crews raises and comment on their relevance to the SO mania as it has developed to the present day. The mania didn’t just ‘happen’, nor is it the logical following out of simply, honest law enforcement and law-making.

And Freud is one of the darker roots of it.

These essays were written by Crews between about 1990 and 2005, published in many places, both books and articles. He has a particular pair of long articles on ‘repressed’ or ‘recovered’ memory from 1994 that are very worthwhile; he looks at the conceptual roots and at the practitioners and theorists (‘cutting edge’ in the early 1990s) who contributed to that craze. Unfortunately, I can only find these articles as part of books (this one included) or at ‘The New York Review of Books’ site, in the Archives section, where they cost a few bucks to purchase for reading or downloading.

Crews notes (p11) that the trend to downplay or even ignore rational principles when examining a problem is common to Postmodernism (and its adherents such as radical feminism) and to both the radical activists and the Flower Children of the late Sixties. But such a sustained aversion to rational principles is also common and basic to the various types of Fundamentalism.

Indeed, you could make the case that the refusal to be bound by rational principles is a basic element in any Fundamentalism – whether it occurs in a religious or secular group (in which sense dogmatic revolutionaries who manage to build an organization are pretty much guaranteed to demonstrate such a characteristic: you’re either ‘for’ the revolution or ‘against’ it, with no questions asked and ‘facts don’t matter’).

Freud’s own system and his original work was “contaminated” (p16) by the grave problem that his explanations presupposed the very propositions that he was supposed to be trying to establish as true (for example: X must be true because the patient remembers it).

As a result, he shrewdly asserted (p74) that since he would never get a fair hearing and would never be judged with “objectivity and tolerance” by the professional scientific and medical community of his times (the later 1800s and very early 1900s) then he neatly insisted that it was his responsibility to humanity to “go it alone” – in other words, build his system without any review by professional peers, and so he nipped in the bud the huge problem of his ‘system’ being grounded not in proven hypotheses but in his own (ever-changing) assertions. He complimented himself on the “moral courage” required to "go it alone".

Interestingly, as certain radical elements of feminism began to gain influence, they took a similar tack, asserting that ‘truth’ is merely “an oppressive, phallo-centric ideal” (p181) and – echoing Carol Gilligan in her 1982 book referenced in my immediately previous Post – that the ‘feminist therapy movement’ would be based on “women’s ways of knowing” – which most certainly did not involve rational principles or verification by careful analysis and experiment, but rather would consist of mutual sharing of ‘stories’ and ‘herstories’ and ‘hystories’ (p180). They complimented themselves on their unique and fresh and rich independence in cutting loose from ‘male’ ways of analyzing things.

You can start to see similarities in the dynamics here, and also how they are helping to build the anti-rational and anti-truth approach that is now clearly visible in the SO mania and its laws: even when clearly phantasmagoric ‘Findings’ are demonstrated to be hugely wrong, legislators and jurists and others seem unfazed, as if they never expected ‘truth’ to be part of the equation in the first place anyway. (Although it would be nice if some of them came right out and said it, just so folks get a true picture of what the frak is going on in this mania – but then, facts don’t matter and ‘what is truth?' … and we’re back to square one).

Crews notes that one abiding influence of Freud is that in his vision of therapy, you would “peel away defensive sublimations” and “regard as primary whatever psychic materials appear most base” (p22).

A couple of thoughts on that.

In Freud’s vision of the human being and human existence, the core and deepest realities of the human person are a dark and vital stew of primitive and untamed energies – violence, aggression, untethered sexual urges, desires and passions**. In order to function in human societies, each human must learn to control those energies and urges. One might do it by ‘repressing’ them and conforming to external requirements in order to at least appear civilized and perhaps carry on an imitation of a ‘mature’ person. Or one might ‘sublimate’ those urges: invest those roiling energies in benevolent and constructive projects.

In either case one does so to ‘defend against’ the brute reality of their power within the self.

And in either case, according to Freud’s vision, every human being, no matter how ‘sublimated’ s/he might be or at least appear to be, is in his/her very core a dark cauldron of primitive passion and energy. And sexual energy is one of the most significant and stubborn of those energies.

You can see here where such a conceptual vision could make a mighty weapon if one, say, were politically seeking to gain the upper hand over one’s chosen political enemies. You might wonder what might happen if Freud were ‘weaponized’, after some modifications. So, for example, if you were to focus his concept only on one group – ‘men’, say – then you could insist that all members of that group were deep-down nothing but rampantly aggressive sex-monsters, no matter how ‘well-adjusted’ or ‘law-abiding’ they might seem. If you recall, this was precisely a point raised in the New Jersey Supreme Court’s effort to justify Registries and Notification in the 1995 Poritz case (about which I Posted in a series over the summer).

Freud, to give him credit, presumed that all human beings – regardless of sex – are such cauldrons, not just ‘males’ or ‘men’. But that was part of his vision that did not serve more recent purposes and was quietly ignored.

I certainly don’t agree with him completely. To say that there is no genuine ‘goodness’ in humans, and that any appearance as such, even if sincere, is merely a shaky construct that serves to hide the true dark primitiveness of human beings, is not something I would agree with.

But I do believe that ‘maturity’ and the process of maturing into one’s higher and better potentials is a task that faces all humans. And without such commitment to achieving some working level of such competence in this absolutely essential human project then no society of humans can long endure. And so I am verrrry much convinced of the value of ‘civilization’ and ‘values’, and that no civilization should be mindlessly ‘deconstructed’ in order to provide more space. You can provide more ‘space’ in a great building by getting rid of the carrying-walls and load-bearing elements, but then the building will collapse. And that cannot in any sense be called ‘an achievement’ or ‘progress’.

Children need to be ‘raised’, in some sense as a great and complex building must be raised. It doesn’t happen ‘naturally’ and sustained and competent adult effort is indispensable to the success of the project. Humans are not ‘flowers’ and don’t just ‘grow’ if they are left alone.

A mid-century commenter on Freud, the French theorist Foucault, gave things his own clever spin by saying that Freud wasn’t really the founder of a proven system of thought (Freud had dodged this requirement himself) but rather was the founder of a new “discursivity” – a new ‘way’ of looking at things and thinking about things that maybe wasn’t so easy to ‘prove’ but – what the hey? – was an interesting and different way of talking about things. And maybe even provided, in a non-provable sort of way, a new form of ‘knowledge’.

Such persons, Foucault felt (and he considered himself to be, along with Freud, one such type of person) could not be required to conform their assertions to ‘truth’ because their new and different way of looking at things, their new and different “discourse” itself “determined truth”. So, then, since such ‘thinkers’ were actually playing around with creating ‘new’ truth, then they couldn’t really be held accountable to an ‘old’ truth.

You can see the effects of this in the SO mania: ‘sex offender’ is now a form of ‘discourse’ – it’s the way much of the public thinks of ‘men’ now: oh, you’re a man – then you must be a sex-offender deep down and that’s the most socially and publicly (and legally) important aspect of you. (And there goes the basis for the rock-bottom reality of your Constitutional rights – your ‘Constitutional status’ isn’t the most important aspect of you as a man – rather, your sex-offending nature is.)

The ‘truth’ of sex-offenders (so often male) therefore is no longer that they are Citizens with Constitutional rights, but rather that they are in their very nature ‘sex offenders’ and therefore ‘threats’ and that ‘truth’ about them overrides all others. I am not going for scoring a rhetorical point here when I point out that this dynamic is precisely the same as deployed in the Salem Witch Trials: the only ‘truth’ about the accused was that they were ‘witches’ or ‘warlocks’. And in the Nazi race laws against the Jewish members of their own citizenry: suddenly you weren’t a respected and successful citizen and perhaps even an honorable German military veteran of the Great War, nor even a human being, but rather the only truth about you was that you were “a Jew”.

And while I don’t imagine that Beltway mover and shakers actually spend time thinking about ‘theory’ and ‘truth’, yet it is precisely the success (so far) of this new ‘discursivity’ about sex-offenders that has now become something about which most will say “well, everybody knows that” – which is the desired end result of Foucault and Freud (among others): their ideas are now so thoroughly believed and accepted that they seem like ‘common sense’ that ‘everybody knows’.

(But clearly things haven’t succeeded as completely and permanently as might have been expected in the early 1990s. As you can see on the Constitutional Fights site and elsewhere, all sorts of persons and official agencies now doubt this new ‘discursivity’ – although they may not even know the term exists. So there is cause for hope and renewed dedication to the task of rolling back this mania.)

And so too, Freud’s “power of narration” – his ‘story’ – can be said, in Foucault’s theory, to “provide a kind of emotional truth” (p50). Notice that it’s not just general ‘truth’ any longer, but rather ‘an emotional truth’. Again, this is the game-plan of a ‘discursivity war’ (if I may): you want to make ‘feelings’ more important than ‘facts’.

And this type of play actually has some probability of succeeding: it’s a lot easier to have feelings than to go to the trouble of acquiring facts. So folks just sort of slide gently into accepting the new ‘truth’, sort of like freezing to death, sliding down and away gently and slowly. And if you are involved with groups who are seeking to suppress your concern about facts and want to intensify your reliance on just feelings … then the slide will progress much more rapidly.

Crews offers (p64) a dozen elements of the anti-empirical, anti-factual thrust in Freud (which, I think you will see, are also clearly discernible in the SO mania).

First, there is a “casually anecdotal approach to corroboration”. All that it takes to establish the ‘truth’ of an assertion is that somebody tells a story that ‘shows’ that the assertion is (or ‘must be’) true. ‘Story’ replaces evidence or analysis.

Second, “a cavalier dismissal of the fundamental epistemic problems of suggestion”. How can you ‘know’ if a person is actually recounting something that is ‘true’ – that the person has independently and consciously experienced – if there exists the strong human tendency to be influenced by the power of suggestion: the ability of the human to sense what is expected of him/her by an inquirer and the willingness of that human to tailor his/her statements to satisfy the inquirer … ? We saw this in the pre-school Satanic Ritual Abuse trials where small children figured out what the adult-investigators wanted to hear and then, with more or less alacrity, said what the investigators wanted to hear.

Third, “the habitual confusion of spectation with fact”. When you presume that what you think you saw is what actually happened. This becomes even more important in the ‘repressed’ or ‘recovered’ memory, and adds the monster complications of an intervening period of many years and – if there was any basis to the memory – the effect of the ‘traumatized’ state of your perceptual apparatus at the time your mind recorded what you saw.

Fourth, “generalizing from a small amount of imperfectly examined instances”. From a too-small number of actual cases, imperfectly analyzed, large generalizations are drawn and asserted as general truth and fact. We have seen this in a number of the most highly-publicized SO cases, but this is also a key dynamic in the ‘statistics’ quoted by many of the mid-1990s writers who were pushing this thing along. In many cases, as is now known, the statistics were derived from a pool of examples too small, and analyzed according to far too flawed categories, to provide accurate information. Of course, given the ‘emergency’, accurate information was not the primary objective.

Fifth, “a lack of vigilance concerning self-contradiction”. Thus there is no critical or even rational analysis of one’s own beliefs, to ensure that one belief doesn’t conflict with or even contradict another. So, for example, claiming that the greatest danger to children is from ‘strangers’ while also insisting that every male is potentially (and perhaps probably) a sex-offender.*** The proper scientific objective is to scrutinize your own claims even more rigorously than anybody else, and to do it before you ever publish your findings – but of course, ‘truth’ and ‘analysis’ is a ‘male’ thing, and conceptual self-analysis and self-criticism is surely not something that is popular in certain feminist and victimist circles.

Sixth, “selective reporting of raw data to fit the latest theoretical enthusiasm”. Anyone familiar with the now-discredited ‘research’ and statistical claims of such popular 1980s-1990s gurus as Lenore Walker and the ‘stories’ from such books as “The Courage to Heal” will recognize this element. And certainly, the hugely selective ‘reasoning’ done by legislative ‘Findings’ and by the courts – especially the Poritz court – to justify Registration and Notification are clear indicators of the essential role this element plays in the entire mania.

Seventh, “ambiguities and exit clauses”. The ambiguous and elastic definitions of terms as 'sex offender', ‘abuse’ and 'sex abuse' and 'epidemic', ‘rape’, ‘pedophile’, ‘mental illness’, and so forth have always enabled this mania to both justify whomever it has caught in its clutches and increase the ‘pool’ of potential (or probable) perpetrators. If I recall correctly, there is a school of ‘therapy’ that accepts ‘emotional incest’, even though a parent has never had any inappropriate physical contact whatsoever. Statistically, the practice of extrapolation – inferring large and general numbers from small study-populations – has always enabled the most frightening and extensive picture to be painted by those who want to see these laws established and expanded. Recall the now-discredited claims of many hundreds of thousands of ‘children’ purported to be ‘abducted’ annually, a claim which combined both elastic definitions of the major terms and extrapolation of the numbers.

Eighth, “allowing negative data to be interpreted as positive ones”. This goes beyond the ‘if even only one’ gambit whereby some of these bad policies and laws are justified on the basis of the emotional claim that they are ‘worth it’ ‘if even only one’ is helped. On that ground, since so many of them die in road crashes, then children should not be allowed in motor vehicles, or perhaps adults should not be allowed to drive them in motor vehicles, or heaven-knows-what-other-possible-pretext, ‘if even only one’ child is thereby spared death or injury.**** A classic gambit along these lines is the handy ‘unreported’ incidences: that even if such and such a crime is declining, there are probably vast numbers of ‘unreported’ incidences that require more money and more police power and more intrusive laws on whatever pretext looks like it will get by the courts and public opinion.

Ninth, “indifference to rival explanations”. So when there are other perfectly plausible explanations for the problem that you claim must be addressed, you ignore it in order to get your ‘explanation’ accepted as the only one and the right one. Is “a feeling of strangeness and alienation” a surefire diagnostic indicator of having been sexually abused as a child, probably by a parent … ? Is it possible that there are other candidates among the mental and emotional disorders (there are several)? Is it possible that you are experiencing an existential rather than a psychological phenomenon: that some individuals are more sensitive by nature to the distance that exists between any and all human beings? Is it possible, even, that you are not ‘re-membering’ actual abuse but merely constructing it, or – as they used to say – fantasizing it? (Even Freud came a cropper when he had to face this possibility and eventually withdrew his initial ‘repressed memory of abuse’ theory in favor of - ummmmmm - a larger role for the active imagination.)

Tenth, “the absence of any specified means for preferring one interpretation to another”. There are no ground rules (so ‘male’ and ‘abstract’) by which any observer or evaluator except one who ‘gets it’ can determine the most likely explanation. This ensures that your group’s preferred beliefs and agenda are kept safe from ‘objective’ (read: intolerant, just-doesn’t-get-it) persons who are not part of your belief group.

Eleventh, the “insistence that only the initiated are entitled to criticize”. This dovetails with Number 10: only those who ‘get it’ and are part of the in-group can criticize the thoughts or offer negative observations or suggest corrections. Although, of course, if you’re in with the in-group (as the songster saith) then you aren’t going to risk your membership by doing any such thing, are you? (A notable exception is the feminist law professor Janet Halley, about whom I wrote in my last Post .) The bottom-line is that NOBODY is going to be doing any critical thinking or analysis of the ‘in’ position or agenda.

And finally, twelfth, the “stigmatization of any disagreement as ‘resistance’”. Here Crews refers to Freud’s sleazy gambit of claiming that any patient who disagreed with his sometimes outlandish interpretations of the patient’s dreams and early experiences was ‘resisting’ him (and later such a patient could easily be dismissed as being ‘in denial’). As if that weren’t bad enough, Freud advised his disciple-analysts to keep pressuring their patients until they submitted to the analyst’s interpretation, no matter how long it took to achieve such a queasy result.

This is the not-too-distant ancestor of ‘backlash’: if you disagree with us, then you’re nothing but a back-lasher (and, later, that you probably are such-and-such yourself). It’s a neat trick that chills any criticism and actually causes many honest thinkers and observers to keep their thoughts to themselves for fear of being branded as ‘against’ good and ‘for’ the evil that agenda wishes everyone to believe is there. Certainly, early objections to the sex-offense mania were tarred with this brush, and even now it is still somewhat risky (though not as much as before) to speak up; those that do, especially professionals with careers, are to be commended. [I’m not a ‘professional’, by the way, and this is not meant as a sly self-congratulation.]

In regard to that power of suggestion and a person’s suggestibility, by the way, Crews takes up the fascinating and distressing fact that in the Salem Witch Trials some of the accused actually came to believe that they were indeed witches (p183).

He recounts the recent story of a father – and a deputy sheriff at that – who was accused of murder and rape of one of his daughter’s friends decades afterward, because the daughter had ‘recovered’ the memory. And with the help of a ‘therapist’ who was his Fundamentalist pastor, he came to believe it, even though there was not only no evidence, even after police tested the old family VW camper-van where the murder alledgedly took place. Indeed, Crews interviewed the man, and for the purposes of testing his veracity actually concocted a fictitious charge that the daughter ‘remembered’, presented it to the now-imprisoned man, and after a few moments the man actually began to remember that Yes, he had done that too.

This is a profoundly disturbing example of human weakness, and perhaps indicative of a significant abnormality itself: that a person, for whatever reasons or under whatever pressures – internal and/or external, might come to agree to his own guilt simply because that assertion is thumped upon him repeatedly. It goes beyond the Party members scooped up in Stalin’s 1930s ‘show trials’, who came to accept their ‘guilt’ as ‘enemies of the revolution’ because they couldn’t bring themselves to contradict the ‘wisdom’ of the Party (and Comrade Stalin); the Party, they had shaped their lives to believe, could never be wrong, and if the Party accused them then they must be guilty.

It is also related in no small way to the current difficulty of accepting as valid the ‘guilty’ admissions of persons who have been tortured. You might want to take the time to re-read Arthur Miller’s early-1950s play “The Crucible” about the Salem Witch Trials, in which Miller dramatizes this phenomenon.

Crews reminds everyone clearly (p150) of the synergy between ‘liberal’ radical feminist sex-offense agitation and rabidly ‘conservative’ Fundamentalists in the pre-school child-sex-abuse trials of the 1980s. You may not recall that the original charges were not simply of ‘sex abuse’ of children but of Satanic Ritual sex-abuse of children. The ‘satanic ritual’ stuff was a poisoned fruit of the political alliance of convenience between ostensibly ‘Liberal’ and ostensibly ‘Conservative’ elements that had been forged to provide a (may I say ‘bipartisan’?) support network for the entire and now-discredited mania.

As best I can figure, once the ‘sex offense’ stuff had become a ‘discourse’ and had taken on a life of its own in public opinion, then the clearly outlandish elements of the alliance could be quietly dumped. Leaving only the more slyly and shrewdly framed ‘public protection from certified sex monsters’ to fuel the current SO mania. Which, still, it continues to do.

I disagree with Crews on his 1994 comment (p156) that the sex mania had begun to dissipate by 1994, having begun in the early 1980s. I don’t think he was positioned at that time to grasp the developing consequences of that awful synergy between a Democratic Party firmly indentured to whatever agendas ‘women’ and ‘victims’ were reputed to demand and a Republican Party, newly empowered, that built its Contract with America on a law-and-order promise that could only fuel an increase in the government’s intrusive police power … on behalf of victims, of course. And against whatever groups of Citizens could be safely disqualified from their Constitutional protections. And We all know where that went.

But he does raise the point that in those days “believe the children” had become the mantra: that whatever the children in the Satanic Ritual Abuse trials could be induced or seduced or coerced into saying must be believed (because, in Freud’s vision, life is only really about the voracious sexual urges that constitute the molten and ultimate bedrock of every human being).

Curiously, Freud and radical feminist thought are in complete agreement about that particular piece of his vision: it’s all about sex. It’s a dark vision, and it not only shrinks and denigrates the higher aspects and “better angels” of human nature, but also undercuts any basis for a Constitutional polity: if people – or at least men – are sex-addled monsters, then it will require a police state to be the zoo-keeper of such a feral herd.

He also reminds Us that in 1971 the American Psychological Association enabled a genuinely deforming and regressive trend by authorizing advanced psychology degrees (Ph.D., Psy.D.) to be awarded without the candidate having to undergo any clinical training at all (p164). Thus a candidate for a major psychology degree need have no training in scientific method and the requirements of genuinely grounded careful research at all. It was the candidate’s “intuition” and not any adherence to the corpus of psychological thought or even to the scientific method that would count for professional competence.

You can imagine, perhaps, what happened when this filtered down to the lesser degrees and the undergraduate psychology education and the associated-field degrees such as social work (which quickly embraced ‘clinical social work’ with no research training) and the even lower rung of self-taught or just ‘concerned’ ‘therapists’ whose gamut of ‘expertise’ reproduces once again the full panoply of historical American hucksterism and quackery, with the possible exception of phrenology and a few other good-old-days techniques. (Which is not to say that each and every social worker is a quack.)

The psychology profession has had, I would say, a bad 40 years; those practitioners who have managed to sustain both ‘concern’ and ‘competence’ are remarkable individuals indeed. Those who have also managed to make a decent living or occupy prestigious public or academic positions are perhaps, in some small way, a proof for the existence of a just and benevolent God.

He mentions the stories of UFO abductees (p211) for a thought-provoking revelation: according to some ‘theorists’, a person who persists in the story of being abducted by UFOs (with or without the sexual probing) is actually engaging in “a political act”, “contesting the status quo” and “resisting an enforced coherence in their lives”.

This is a corker. There are people in well-paid positions of great professional and social status whose essential take on UFO abductions is that the ‘stories’ are an act of political resistance to conformity. Further, as Crews sums it up, “mere persistence in UFO delusions, then, constitutes useful sabotage of the evil American empire”.

Now I am no jingoistic supporter of ‘empire’, and in that I take my cue from Messrs. Washington, Adams, Madison, et al. But to assert that telling outlandish stories is primarily a “political act” gives a clear indication of where things have gone off the rails around here in the past 40-50 years. You can see where ‘facts don’t matter’ comes from. It’s not whether you are telling the truth, or whether you are making statements that can be verified by others. It’s that you are doing SOMEthing to further the great political agenda of sabotaging or subverting “the dominant discourse” – and anything done to achieve that purpose is OK (and proves that you ‘get it’).

And doubting such stories means that you’re just a back-lasher.

How oh how can a Constitutional polity and a public deliberation be conducted and sustained when the Citizens are bethump’t by so many – and many of them ‘elites’ – who don’t feel themselves required to tell the truth? Or, at least, feel themselves obligated to serve a ‘higher truth’ that somehow works out to be the opposite of ‘truth’ as it is generally understood (in, of course, that evilllll ‘dominant discourse’). So truth as it is generally understood is really not-truth, and the ‘higher truth’ is really an anti-truth, and if you can accept that then you ‘get it’, and if not, not.

This is what is at stake here. This is what’s happening to the country and the SO mania is a prime ground where the rubber meets the road. The SO mania is where all this theory has blended with the various political machinations and calculations of the Beltway and the State legislators, and all the prosecutors, cottage-industry ‘therapists’, ‘conservatives’, ‘progressives’, ‘decent citizens’, victim advocates, headline-happy media, and – alas – too many of the personnel who have for purposes of employment if not vocation sworn to uphold, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.

Crews discusses Post-Structuralism (p297); it’s enough for Our purposes here to repeat his summary: “that self-hood is shaped in part by tacit ideology; that ‘truth’ often does the bidding of power; and that we should always ask whose interests are being served by a given claim to cultural authority or power”.

There’s a lot that worthwhile in that. The way that a culture and a civilization ‘sees’ the world does constitute part of the trellis on which the young vines are first shaped. But that doesn’t mean that since six different blind men sense six different parts of the elephant then there is no real elephant at all. It does mean that the human spirit – young and mature – needs a trellis to shape itself, and that trellis must be capable of bearing the weight of the needy human spirit and not simply a figment of any individual’s imagination.

And none of the Framers would have had any objection to the observation that ‘truth’ could be subverted by power. That, indeed, is why they built the marvelous if clanky Constitutional machinery – so that as many Citizens as possible could exercise some serious authority to prevent the type of political or emotional power-plays that would override the rights – based on those “self-evident truths” – of other Citizens. But while the Framers were acutely aware of the fragility of ‘truth’ and its need of support by the Citizenry, they most certainly would not, could not, and did not accept that there was no ‘truth’ at all and that everything was up for grabs by whomever managed to ‘control the discourse’.

And as Josef Goebbels showed everybody, a modern mass-society can far too easily be subverted to whatever discourse the ‘dominant party’ wished to impose, given just the right blend of political seduction, manipulation, dishonesty, and brute force. I get nervous when any group claims it wants to ‘control’, even to control something as seemingly immaterial as ‘the discourse’. And those who seek to ‘control’ must by definition seek ‘power’, and then the ‘discourse’ will answer to them and everything goes back to square one, except that now the Constitution has been gutted.

And if it’s true that one should always ask whose interests are being served in any claim to cultural authority, then I’d say that the cultural and political authority that is fueling the SO mania has to be questioned, and rather closely. Lives have been lost, many more wrecked, and the Constitution twisted into a grotesque legal and philosophical pretzel in order to keep this thing going.

And, as I see it, by an ‘authority’ that doesn’t seem to consider itself accountable to ‘truth’ or to ‘facts’ and a government that seems not to consider itself accountable for the Constitution or for the wisdom and integrity of the laws.

We got trouble in River City.

NOTES

*Crews, Frederick: “Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays”. Shoemaker & Hoard : Emeryville, CA. 1st edition; 2006. My page references will refer to this edition.

**It’s not easy to hold that Freud imagined childhood as a time of ‘innocence’ – psychologically speaking – and children as pure little innocents. Rather, in his vision they are, by virtue of not yet being ‘civilized’ the most clear examples of the very primitive beginnings of the human species. Whether such primitiveness is ‘natural’ or not is another and equally troubling and complex matter.

***This is distinct from the phenomenon – specific to the sex-offense mania – that ‘the children’ are primarily the ones in danger. This focus, I think, represents a tactical compromise in the ungainly political alliances cobbled together to support the thing. So-called ‘conservative’ elements that seek more law-and-order and thus more police power would not want to be too closely associated with ‘feminism’ and thus might not care to be seen as supporting ‘another feminist thing’; in which case ‘the children’ – like the baby seals on the wildlife preservation commercials – are a ‘victim’ that all the elements of the alliance can support. Interestingly, of the nation’s 750,000 or so registered SO’s (excluding whatever number have been categorically dragooned by the Adam Walsh Act), I can’t find a breakdown of exactly what they were convicted of – and I’m going to venture the thought that few of the nation’s RSO’s are actually offenders-against-children.

****This month’s print issue of ‘Reason’ magazine (p13) reports that in the UK (which, although it hasn’t gone as gaga over Registration and Notification as the US has, is still capable of serious PC whackery) an interschool athletic competition day was put off limits to the parents. Says one educational bureaucrat, “All unsupervised adults must be kept away from children”. Give that some thought. And of course, We are immediately thrown back to the problem that even the Romans had to face: who supervises the supervisors themselves? (Or, if you like the Latin, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?) You wonder how any UK male – or possibly any adult – achieves the necessary ‘clearance’ to work with children at all.

JANET HALLEY: TAKE A BREAK FROM FEMINISM

(I Posted this on my other site, but here I’ll make a few more SO-specific comments. My comments here will be in italics.)

I just read the 2006 book “Split Decisions” by Janet Halley, a professor at Harvard Law School.

I try to keep up with feminist thinking, as you can tell from prior Posts. Feminism has been one of the most substantial influences on the way things have gone in the country these past few decades (the Biblical 40 years and heading toward half-a-century, now) and since it mostly receives a very Politically Correct kid-glove treatment in the mainstream media, it seems to me that it needs a much more careful and not so cream-puffy an examination.

The subtitle caught my eye: ‘How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism’. Now that, I thought, is something you don’t see every day. Especially from an established and prestigiously placed feminist and female author.

It’s never been my position that women (not to be equated with feminists, nor vice versa) should be considered nothing more than the docile herd in the deerpark of male sexual conquests, nor do I hold any brief for males who define themselves, their lives, and their ‘success’ in terms of sexual conquests, especially violent ones. Such a habitus does no good for the maturational prospects of any male, as well as harming any female who comes within range.

So I read the book last night and have a few thoughts. This is not a formal review, of course, so I’m only covering the thoughts that strike me. I’ll give page numbers from the text* when I quote a major point.

She quotes a couple of feminist slogans: “I’ll see it when I believe it” and “I’ll see it when I can theorize it” (p3). These seem to refer to the valid enough epistemological insight that if you don’t have a category for something, you may well not even notice it.

It’s not a bad insight. I recall when I first heard an electronic siren (the whoo-whoo, woop-woop) that began to replace the old mechanical sirens (that sounded like smaller versions of the air-raid sirens of World War 2): I didn’t hear it at first, but rather I felt it – I realized after a bit that my eardrums seemed to be vibrating. Focusing on that odd sensation, it was only then that I realized that something was making a noise, and it turned out to be the local fire chief, whose 1960 Pontiac was coming up the street with its red bubble revolving and this strange contraption on the roof apparently making the noise. The chief was having a hard time moving along, since most drivers didn’t seem to realize what his cutting-edge, state of the art, new-fangled siren was (long before the end of the decade, all Americans who watched the TV news came to know the sound very well).

I didn’t have a mental file for that sound, so I actually didn’t hear it – I only felt its effects (on my poor eardrums). But after that I had a file and I heard them for what they were. That’s epistemology for you.

At the same time, though, I hadn’t studied meteorology and knew what thunder was, so some stuff seems to come almost pre-loaded in the human brain, or it’s learned so early – before the capacity for self-awareness is fully operational – that it seems like you’ve known it all along.

But that part about ‘theorizing’ adds an extra layer of complication: it’s one thing to encounter a strange new machine and put together for yourself what the thing does. It’s a different level of life’s Vulcan chess game to interpret for yourself what an idea or a ‘concept’ is and what it’s all about and what it does. And then to assume that your take on that idea or concept (not physically real like the machine) is the full and accurate take to be had about the thing. And then another step to assume that other folks should agree with you. And then another step to assume that if they don’t, then they just don’t get it and need to made to agree with you.

You see where these things can go. As Bilbo tells Frodo there in Bag End, taking a single step outside your door is a momentous and freighted thing: you never can tell where the Road will take you. (Did you think it was just a movie or just a fiction?)

Halley mentions “the thrill of liberation from the self”, which I think she is defining when she goes on to say “the complexly constituted erotic self”. I can’t be comfortable with any implication that the self – the marvelous human self – can be reduced to its (admittedly complex) sexual aspects and potentials. If for no other reason, I think that the Framers imagined a Constitution that would provide a framework for the political affairs of a citizenry who were indeed individuals who were – according to their individual gifts and lights – efficaciously committed to maturing the self that each of them possessed, thus then coming together to deliberate about their public affairs, thus both grounding and holding accountable the government that the Framers were oh-so-carefully limiting and structuring through the actual Constitution.

If no complex, dynamically maturing Citizens, then no way that the Constitutional machine itself could keep going; like a Ferris wheel (not invented, I agree, at the time of the Framers) that required struts to keep it solidly and stably anchored if it were to perform its marvelous movement.

In the Constitutional vision, The People is/are the struts that hold the great machine up and also anchor it against the various momentums of its own movements. Otherwise you get the vivid result so neatly imagined by Steven Spielberg in his 1978 film “1941”, where the Ferris wheel, shot free from its struts, rolls drunkenly along a pier and over the edge into the sea. You might have realized the same sensation yourself in recent years, watching national policy and the Beltway careen ever more drunkenly. There is an edge out there, ahead of Us, somewhere.

In order to be credibly feminist, any approach has to accept the following stipulations, says Halley: a) that there is a distinction between male and female; b) that the female is subordinated to the male; c) that opposition to that subordination is required (p17).

I can see that and I can accept it as an approach to construing American civic life. I would be verrry uncomfortable if the primary unity, the core identity, of Americans as Americans, was subordinated to that, however. If for no other reason than the threat posed to the integrity of The People in the vital role of holding up and holding steady the great machine of the Constitutional arrangement.

Once ‘gender’ (or any other aspect of anyone’s complex identity) functionally replaces ‘American’ as the most important definition, then for the most fundamental political purposes at least, We in a heepa trubble.

And if a theory insists that “subordinated sexuality” is the most important and immediate aspect of fully one-half of the Citizenry’s identity, then not only as individuals but as a Citizenry We are taking a mighty limited view of Ourselves, as human beings and as a People. And there will be consequences, just as surely as deconstructing the struts on a Ferris wheel will yield rather inevitable consequences.

And you can see here how the almost complete reduction of civic matters to one of ‘sex’ starts a trajectory toward the SO-mania and its matrix of laws.

Haley muses that by the early 1980s much feminist theorizing – not all of it congruent and easily meshed – had already been done. But then three things happened: a) AIDS; b) ‘power feminism’s’** determination to focus on domestic violence and sexual violence; c) postmodernism (p28).

About (a) I simply note that a thoroughly ‘liberated’ (which is to say unlimited and un-Shaped) sexual range can have profound, even if unintended consequences – although the effects on the maturity and genuine human development of the individual are, though less obvious, even worse than the disease itself.

About (b) I would note that in that same decade of the 1990s that Halley will call “the decade par excellence of governance feminism”*** (p32) this country adopted a host of police-state tactics, including registries (domestic violence and sex offense), arrest without warrant on the simple say-so of another citizen (domestic violence), special courts (domestic violence), and the widespread government-sponsored certification of an entire group of citizens as incorrigible and recidivist monstrosities (sex offense) that allegedly required not only extensive police monitoring but widespread public notification (sex offense).

I would also note that the Constitutional difficulties with the sex-offense laws have increased exponentially, rather than declined, in the two decades since their inception and now include traditionally conservative elements such as the Cato Institute and the actual State governments and police agencies themselves.

This can hardly be an unintended consequence when so much of feminist thought considers “male sexuality to be a vast social problem” (p27). Or, as Lacanian linguistic theory would put it: all of a sudden, almost one-half of the Citizenry of this nation were, in the blink of an eye, and with the politicos' eager support, 'problematized'. Now that is something you haven't seen too often in human history, and that's probably not just coincidence: governments and nations who embark on such a path aren't going to last too long. Or, as one dead white male has put it, echoing some other dead white male: "a house divided against itself cannot stand".

It is also a recipe for profound public, civic, political damage, when – especially with the connivance of the elected officials of the government – almost one half of the nation’s citizens are conceived of as a vast social problem almost overnight. It reminds one of the sudden Soviet attitude and policy toward the Kulaks; but more relevantly to a democracy, it clearly promises to rend the polity jaggedly and profoundly.

You find yourself asking: what democratic government in its right mind would undertake to support such a program? And so enthusiastically? And, of course, having once fractured The People so profoundly, the limits on overweening government built into the Constitutional ethos are themselves effectively fractured as well. As We have been seeing of late.

The idea of governance feminism, it seems to me, was that feminist Theory had to be taken out of the classroom and chatroom and organized into a political pressure that would insist on Theory-friendly changes to American law and jurisprudence. The Democrats were the first to get on-board, since the whole thing had started out as a matter of ‘liberation’ and ‘empowerment’ and as far back as the late Sixties the Democrats had – in a certain amount of desperation (Vietnam, the unexpectedly rackety turn of the post-1966 black civil rights movement) – realized the voter-demographic potential of ‘women’. And of course by ‘women’ I mean and the feminists meant ‘the advocacy of feminist Theory’ as applied through vigorous political pressure on the elected officials.

About (c) Halley herself describes postmodernism’s “anti-foundational, libertine, irrationalist, anti-moralistic” elements (p29). How could it escape anybody that such a caustic dissolvent would most likely corrode much of the machinery and the struts of the Constitution? Would most likely corrode and even corrupt the maturity and civic competence of the individual Citizens themselves?

Such a ‘deconstruction’ of the fundamental principles and ethos of Constitutional and traditional American social, cultural, and even legal practice cleared the path for the flood of sex-offense laws (although the path was already forged by much of the domestic-violence matrix as well). It’s as if they set a wildfire which destroyed the trees, and thus left the ground open for huge mudslides because there were not trees to inhibit the flow of water when the rains came.

Halley reports herself “happy” that governance feminism made certain problems “visible” and showed “reality” while “making life better, even if marginally – for women” (p32). About the Constitutional ramifications, and the ramifications for many individuals – most of them males - ever more intensely coming to light, Halley has nothing to say, nor is there even an entry for ‘Constitution’ in a comprehensive Index at the back of the book. Which, as I have been saying recently, is one of the gravest problems with the entire feminist enterprise as it has been embraced and fulfilled by government policy, regulation, and – oy – criminal law.

It sort of stuns that there are very sizable and influential groups in this country who see the 1990s (the domestic violence laws and then the sex-offense mania and its laws) as pretty much a ‘success’ as well – even more disturbingly – as a ‘victory’ and a ‘vanquishing’. We are talking about American citizens here. Aya Gruber’s article reviewed in one of my recent Posts speaks to this as well: the feminists deciding for political tactical reasons to cast in their lot with the law-and-order, criminalize-everything interests who were no more ‘conservative’ than the governance feminists were ‘liberal’.

She quotes admiringly Catharine MacKinnon, early theorizer and icon of in-your-face feminism (although Halley quickly notes that MacKinnon has a mellower later phase as well): “My consciousness is true, yours is false, never mind why”(p44). This is quickly followed by a second bon mot: “I know I’m right because it feels right to me, never mind why”.

This sort of assertion became acceptable as ‘evidence’, and worse, as ‘evidence’ that could not be questioned without ‘re-injuring’ the person who made the assertion. In a way too, I think this goes some way toward explaining what Wayne Logan has observed to be the SO mania’s imperviousness to the true and actual facts about such myths as ‘sex offender recidivism’ and ‘stranger-danger’ (you can see a nice list of myths on the Constitutional Fights site by the new group WAR (Women Against the Registry). The legislators who passed these things hold the radical feminist position ‘Never Mind Why’ – which is, I would say, a powerful reason to question the conceptual integrity of the legislators and jurists who continue, even in the face of mounting evidence, to support them.

As the Brits would say: So there it is then. In the proverbial nutshell. Never mind why. How carry on a democratic politics, how conduct any sort of civil or civic discussion at all? Nor is it enough to say that this is from her ‘early’ period and perhaps later disowned, modified, or de-emphasized; this was the type of stuff that overran such conceptual and intellectual defenses as the Beltway in the Reagan era might have mustered.

It’s a sign of precisely the approach – Never Mind Why – that has resulted in the destruction of a politics (or political class) based on deliberation and gravitas, and the erection (as it were) of a politics (and political class) of emotional assertion and thorough-going anti-intellectualism. Let’s not think that Rush Limbaugh is purely a product of the Right; the launch skids were greased for that behemoth by MacKinnon and her brassy and cocky (as it were) sistern (male and female).

The media lapped it up like catnip.

And this goes a great way toward explaining that jaw-dropping media moment in the now infamous Duke Lacrosse gang-rape when, as the prosecutor's case started to cave in by the chunkful, almost one hundred of the faculty stated officially to the media that "facts don't matter". The Theory had convicted these 'males', these 'men', and - as Goebbels was fond of telling the German people, "that's all you need to know".

It was MacKinnon’s insight to “use the law to resist male domination” (p56). Now male domination, except in the most overt cases of rape, is something that – in feminism’s own schematic – you have to believe in and theorize in order to ‘see’. Something so deep – if it is, and subtle – as it apparently is, and long-lived – as it is claimed to be … something that complex is not something against which any rational government deploys the short, sharp, blunt-edged tool of the criminal law. But again … the Beltway did. And is still doing.

Which is not to say that ‘male domination’ doesn’t exist. But granted that it does, in some form, and to some extent rather short of ‘total’, then it was going to take some careful and extensive deliberation to get to work on it. Which is neither the European revolutionary way, nor the impatient attention-challenged American way – and the feminists had drunk deeply from both tainted wells. Enter then the vote-addled Democrats, certain that the female demographic was too frakking big to lose and that the ‘white industrial male’ demographic was most certainly going the way of the dodo, courtesy of the corporate biggies who were paying handsomely into the Beltway’s PACs for the privilege of ‘outsourcing’ as fast as they could line up cheap labor in the paddies, fields, and backstreets of the Third World. Those were the days.

In short, MacKinnon’s plan – espoused by the vote-addled politicos – was to “use law to undo gender” (p56). Once again, it may seem strange that a democratic and Constitutionally-limited government would seek to deploy its carefully constrained authority in order to undo with Law what millennia of human history, tradition, and experience indicated might be a substantial human reality, but as it worked its way through the Looking-Glass the Beltway lost track of just what ‘strange’ might be. Which was the plan; it was Incorrect to be judgmental and categorize things, especially in an insensitive and negative way. Those were the days.

Cultural feminism holds, in Halley’s taxonomy, that “women have a distinct consciousness and/or culture”, although then this consciousness might derive either from their biological situation or from “their historical oppression by men” (p58). Which leaves a lot of blank space to be filled in on the map.

Halley uses an interesting and useful example: imagine that women make good mothers. An ‘essentialist’ analysis would say that women are naturally maternal, while a ‘social constructivist’ analysis would say that men made women do all the mothering so they just sort of got good at it. When last I got a memo on the subject, you could lose your job or wind up in front of some sort of adjudication if you proposed that the former might well be the case (although one never gets all the memos in an ongoing revolution that bids fair to become permanent … sort of like wars that are forecast to last generations – although I don’t think that anybody planned the Hundred Years War with that particular timeframe in mind).

As I’ve said before, from everything known about Evolution, its Modus Operandi – verrry well established – is to provide deeply for the most important purposes. So, in something as primary as the reproductive survival of the species, and in a species that has the largest relative brain of all the animal kingdom and takes the longest time to mature to full brain potency, then the big E would probably want to ensure steady and reliable care. It would ensure that by preparing the child-bearer as deeply and complexly as possible. And perhaps the lumpish Fred Flintstones of the earliest hominid communities realized exactly what Wilma seemed to be able to do with kids; perhaps they weren’t such cartoon characters as they have been made out to be.

To imagine Evolution looking at both the male and the female adults of the species and merely dismissively waving its hand in a Yeah, Whatevvvvverrrrrr sorta way … I don’t think so. Evolution, unlike Americans nowadays, doesn’t just wave its hand dismissively and leave it up to Whaaateverrrr. It takes steps – verrrry specific steps. I’m jus’ sayin’.

Halley quotes Robin West, author if 1997’s “Caring for Justice” and, Halley opines, “one of the legal academy’s most articulate and theoretically astute cultural feminists”: “There is such a thing as patriarchy - ‘the social system when men’s interests trump women’s whenever they conflict’ – … [and] no society is utterly free of it, even this one ” (p60).

Which says a lot less than it looks like it’s saying. No society is utterly free of anything, and surely the contention that America is one of the most horribly patriarchal of them all has become gospel (you should pardon the expression) among American elites and among all those kiddies whose parents have recently shelled out two-hundred and fifty large for a first-rate education.

But according to this theory, feminism is also “an irrepressible human reality” – which kind of jars since the last memo I saw was to the effect that the afore-mentioned patriarchy had repressed it all since just a few minutes after the beginning of recorded human history. So it leaves you wondering how an irrepressible human reality was so repressible for so long and more or less so thoroughly. I’m jus’ sayin’. Is it at all possible that it was so repressible from the get-go since even the most benighted cave-folk got the impression that to the best of their observation that’s the way things worked best for the species?

Which is not to say that therefore the world should go back to the cave (although you could say that most of it has never left Plato’s Cave, but let me not digress). But it is to say that if something has been chugging along since about the beginning of human history then you might not want to just haul off and rip it out by the roots on the basis of the most trendy theories, no matter how forcefully asserted. Some serious deliberative thought might be in order. It’s not as if it were as clear as, say, the blatant injustice of the old Jim Crow laws.

Further, for MacKinnon – who was riding pretty high in elite circles during the 1980s – male domination was not a “moral” issue (p61). I take this to mean that it was not a matter of individual males acting illegally or immorally; rather, the thing should be seen as a deep-seated gender-wide issue that required the hammer and sickle of the Law, as hefty and robust as the Beltway could wield them. The hammer and sickle, that is to say, to be struck at the roots of the male sex as a class – which has more than a vaguely Commie ring to it. (Funny, that as the Soviets and their ideas and their political system were lurching toward utter implosion and dissolution ‘over there’ their illuminations were being taken up as the new gospel ‘over here’ – funny, funny, funny).

MacKinnon is here engaging in the old Soviet gambit of raising up a ‘class enemy’ against whom the State, in its righteous defense of ‘the masses’ may deploy whatever hostile actions it wishes to. The Kulaks – successful farmers, though no doubt some individuals engaged in some sharp practice against the peasants – were not considered individually as criminals, but rather as a criminal class and an ‘enemy of the people’.

Of course there are radical branches of feminist Theory that do indeed see ‘men’ and ‘male sexuality’ and ‘male dominance’ as conceptually wrong and oppressive, such that any and every male and all males together can always be assumed to be ‘enemies’ of women’s interests and freedom. They hew even more closely to the Soviet playbook.

In which case the domestic-violence and sex-offense laws are the righteous war of the ‘people’ and their government against the ‘class’ (in this case sex or gender) enemy’. And as always, such revolutionary ideology has never been susceptible to any sort of proof to the contrary or even any evidence. It is the Theory itself that has convicted the ‘class enemy’ and facts would merely get in the way. So from a Soviet point of view, Never Mind Why is not only acceptable but even required. And to allow yourself to be distracted by facts makes you yourself an enemy of the revolution.

Women, it was said – and I am not in complete disagreement with this – were not simply discriminated against but were “subordinated” and “undervalued” (p62).

Personally, I think – and this is hardly original, I agree – that one of the greatest candidates for the term ‘original sinfulness’ is the perennial human tendency to undervalue the human species in all its powerful and marvelous potential. This is truly a profound and abiding human tragedy, and the seedbed of catastrophes great and small; nor is each small or individual instance of it any less significant merely because of its ‘small’, ‘individual’ site. A human being, truly, is a terrible thing to waste. And, I believe, the entire species pays for such losses.

There are, it is said – and no doubt this was impressed upon the less-then-profound politicos – two diametric sexes, and they are set against each other, and that is absolutely the fundamental human (and political) reality; there are “gendered harms” (p63) that women suffer and men, precisely, do not. And it is the government’s responsibility – the politicos were told in season and out of season – to fix that.

About harms males may suffer for being male, and the trials and tribulations of being a ‘man’ in this world, nothing is said. Which is in a way as it should be – feminism is an advocacy after all, and you expect an advocacy to speak highly and vividly about its clients’ concerns. But all of this has been presented – over the past few decades – not as an advocacy position looking for some purchase on the political ground, but rather as the hugest and most awful discovery ever to be made in the history of the species. Intellectual hubris or P.T. Barnum exaggeration or a shrewd Goebbelsian shot in the air that will spark a public stampede (and a stampede among the halls of the government) … you can take your pick as to the relative proportions of each in the recipe.

And of course, following the Soviet playbook, this is an advocacy that needs ‘an enemy’ in order to establish itself and mobilize its supporters. The Movement itself, like the Red Revolution (at least until Stalin got rid of all the dissenting revolutionaries who disagreed with his interpretation of the revolution) needed ‘enemies’ in order to distract people from the incoherence and incompatibility of its many assertions and claims.

West is continued: “Virtuous sexuality is feminine sexuality and it has a decidedly infantile, lesbian, and caring shape” (p64). This foregoing is asserted proudly. The theory, it seems, is that young girls develop a deep love for older women in their lives (their mothers, one imagines, first of all) but are too soon ripped away from that caring and nurturing experience in order to define themselves by and conform themselves to their roles in the domination-subordination script imposed by patriarchy as an established concept and by sex-crazed, thoughtlessly assertive and violently aggressive ‘men’.

And once again, one wonders: sure, it’s a theory and deserves a careful look, but would any democratic government in its right mind simply throw the weight of its authority, prestige, and the consensus of its very legitimacy behind such a vision? No wonder that even after Bush the Egregious frakked up the economy and started two losing wars, the Democrats were just able to squeak by in the last presidential election.

There are a lot of people in the country, I think, who are not happy with the sex-offense situation as it is evolving, just as there were many who probably voted Republican not because they are imperialist running-dogs and jingo-crazed super-patriots but simply because they are deeply uneasy with where the Democrats are taking things.

Halley will quote the feminist writer Adrienne Rich who posits “a redemptive, feminist, intrinsically lesbian sexuality”, even “infinitely redemptive” (p64). And another feminist writer, Ellen Bass, who posits the “redeemed sexuality of the original desire” (meaning the original attraction of the young girl to the older female). Is it just me or am I right in thinking that if this statement were about males, then such an assertion would bring you dangerously close to the NAMBLA position?

And I’m still not in agreement that ‘sex’ and the having of it somehow constitutes the essence of being human and the epitome of human achievement, self-awareness and self-definition. Where would We be if Homer and Dante and Michelangelo and Theresa of Avila and Elizabeth I**** followed such a philosophy of self and of the human? Of course there was Catherine the Great (the empress, not the feminist philosopher) … but her mark on history was not as great as the possibilities of her position might have provided, and there was that stuff about the Guardsmen … and something about a horse.

Sex in and of itself doesn’t and can’t ‘redeem’ a life. It has its occasional highs and its pleasures, of course, but except in a kid's idea of the world you can’t build and conduct a life – and a self – on such a narrow and limited basis.

But now Halley gets to some material that I think contains crucial information, relevant to the situation the country faces today.

In 1982 the psychologist Carol Gilligan wrote the book “In a Different Voice”. She asserted that the moral development of females and males differed. The boys developed an “ethic of justice, predicated on the understanding of human beings as individuated and separate, and on the rule of logic and the rule of law”.

The girls, however, “saw that the world is not made up of separated, self-seeking individuals but rather of interrelations, connections webbing everyone together in communities of concern”; further, that “they made moral decisions not through abstract reasoning from rules but by balancing the infinitesimal and acute needs of everybody concerned” (p69). (Italics mine) This, Gilligan said, is an ‘ethic of caring’.

The boys’ “ethic of justice” was contrasted to the girls’ “ethic of caring”.

THIS, as the kids would say, is HUGE.

If you think you can hear oblique echoes of the Sotomayor confirmation hearings, I think what you have here is the American start of it all.

But more fundamentally, I think what you have here is the dark beating heart of the intensifying Constitutional corrosion that has been going on for decades, for which the Bush Era skullduggery is not a cause or source, but merely a symptom and a result.

If you look at what the boys are doing, you will see the essential philosophy underlying the Constitutional ethos: individual persons, responsible for themselves and their development, responsible as well for their actions, but they will be judged – if such be required – according to the logic of cause and effect and according to the rules of the applicable laws. The government, of course, is as contained in its powers and the responsible use of them as the individual citizens are contained by their responsibilities under the laws.

The girls – in Gilligan’s schematic – entertain a vision that is hell and gone from that. It’s a more maternal (!) approach: whichever baby is crying is to be helped along and soothed, regardless of whether there is a ‘reason’ for it to be crying. It’s a fine approach for dealing with still undeveloped infants still helplessly subject to the waves of their passions and emotions’ they can’t be expected to use their ‘reason’ to self-modulate their emotions.

But a nation is comprised of adults who are responsible. Or should be. Or perhaps must be.

The ‘ethic of caring’ works perfectly well for infants. But the ‘ethic of justice’ is what works for adults. If you’re going to have a Constitutionally envisioned limited government, grounded by a Constitutionally envisioned mature Citizenry.

Any government that is going to appoint itself as the Fixer of All Pain is going to be taking on the role of God and the angels – and will demand that much authority (it can never attain that much wisdom). Bill Clinton’s nifty soundbite – I feel your pain – stems ultimately from this schematic of Gilligan’s, I think.

I think it’s clear here how the ‘ethic of caring’ – when raised to the level of national policy on the highest and most profound levels – is a perfect vehicle to justify the sex-offense laws: the government must ‘protect’ and the best way to do that is to ‘prevent’ – and, bingo, the sex-offense Registration and Notification schemes and the civil-commitment schemes and the residency-restriction schemes and all the rest.

And I hope I don’t have to say it too loudly: I am not ‘un-caring’ and I think that ‘care’ is a profoundly valuable and indeed a vital element in the quality of personal and societal life. Indeed, for anyone who does find him/herself engaging in sex-offenses, this may be an excellent starting point for self-repair: to inflict a genuine sex-offense is clear indication that the offender doesn’t care enough about him/herself as a human being, nor about the victim as a human being.

It seems to me that Bush the Egregious merely took advantage of the Constitutional deformities already enshrined by the Left’s reputedly liberal emotionalism, applied it to the emotional situation created by 9-11, and the rest is history – although a history still bursting even now.

And his puppet Attorney General, Gonzales, surely was not intelligent enough or observant enough to declare the Constitution “quaint”. I would say that the Constitution was rendered unworkable the moment a quarter century or so ago when Gilligan’s ‘ethics of care’ began to gain traction inside the Beltway and in the law schools (whence prosecutors, US Attorneys, politicians, and judges of all ranks have now sprung).

Halley doesn’t go into the downsides. She does mention the “dark side” of feminism, and that there is – and of necessity – “blood on its hands” from where things had to be done (though she doesn’t go so far as to repeat the old Communist saw about the eggs that have to be broken to make an omlette). More on that in a moment.

Surely one of the dark sides is this creation of an ‘enemy’ and then the waging of ‘war’ upon that enemy, which is what we see in the sex-offense mania and its matrix of laws. ‘Men’ were the eggs that had to be broken to make the omlette of the feminist ‘revolution’ – and that is wrong on soooo many levels.

When she gets to the gist of her main point, fully expounding it towards the end of the book, she does remarkable work. Without rancor, supportively and yet firmly, she suggests that it’s time to Take A Break From Feminism (pp.341-ff).

And then she unpacks that.

Feminists need to stop repeating the “subordination mantra”, that women are subordinated (thus oppressed) by men. She calls it the “politics of injury” (I would call it ‘victimism’, but I can see where she’s trying not to be too inflammatory and, following the best advice of Gilbert and Sullivan, seeks to “gild the philosophic pill”.) She bravely adverts, nonetheless, to the follow-up phase in the Politics of Injury: questioning an assertion made by one of the injured is tantamount to re-injuring her.

Feminists have to stop seeing the “brain drain as a good thing”. Here she refers to something you don’t often see discussed in the media: that women who in their reflections and thoughts and observations come up with conclusions unacceptable to feminist orthodoxy are hounded or frozen out of the feminist ranks. She herself shares the feeling that when she wondered about the damage that available prostitutes might do to men she immediately felt that “it seems somehow not-feminist to suggest it”.

Feminists need to resist bad faith. The wide and frequent deployment of the Injury Triad (female injury plus female innocence plus male immunity) has to be acknowledged for what it does. It does not eliminate consequences and costs simply by removing those costs and consequences from women; it merely shifts those consequences and costs to others. And feminists who claim that they can exercise broad and deep political power without causing injury to – she dares to say it – men must stop such posturing, stop operating in such bad faith.

Feminists need to minimize moral perfectionism and their magical-realism style of thinking. They cannot claim that women, being oppressed and victims, can never themselves oppress and victimize others once they exercise power. Feminism, especially in the exercise of long-sought power, cannot hold itself as “morally immaculate” (p344).

Feminists need to deconstitute women’s suffering. Might it not harm a woman – she suggests – to insist that if she has been raped she is now so traumatized that she may well never recover? Is it always ‘blaming the victim’ to inquire whether in a particular case any activity of the female might have been contributory? Does it do women any good to dogmatically remove them from any responsibility for their experiences at all? Is the standard and required feminist “rape discourse” (subject-verb-object, man-raped-woman) sufficient to all situations and does it respect the complexity and integrity of human experience? Is it possible that in affirming and identifying with female “injury” feminism is actually intensifying it?

These are splendid questions. I’d have to say that they should have been asked long ago, but that is not the particular fault of Halley, whose book – with full and due regard for feminism’s acute sensibilities – asks questions that must be considered.

In fact, this whole concept of Theory needs to be looked at. It’s all very well for a bunch of humanities and literature types to think up ways they can play with a text like kids’ play-clay, but an actual living nation is not a ‘text’, nor is a society, and while the Constitution is a document, it’s a hell of a lot more than simply another piece of fiction to be parsed and cut-pasted.

In that regard, I recall what Frederick Crews said; he was speaking about Freudian theories, but it could apply to all this material here as well: “Freudian concepts retain some currency in popular lore, the arts, and the academic humanities, three arenas in which flawed but once modish ideas, secure from the menace of rigorous testing, can be kept indefinitely in play”.*****

Many of the foundational assumptions and assertions of feminist theory – in all the dense and indeed jungle-like tangle of its diversity – are very much still “in play”. For that matter, the entire country, the entire nation, the entire society, the entire culture, the entire ethos of Western civilization is very much a playing board, for games political as well as Theoretical. Which does not, for all its brash and frizzy excitements, bespeak a becoming gravitas about just what an amazing but fragile construction has been bequeathed to Us. We may well improve upon it; but We are fools to ‘deconstruct’ it.

Still and all, Professor Halley has done a great and worthwhile service here. And I don’t know if anybody outside the charmed circle of feminist true-believers could do it with any chance of being heard. I am reminded of the observation that “only Nixon could go to China”, although I mean thereby no disrespect to Professor Halley.

I’d conclude this, however, by connecting another dot from beyond her book. An article by Joshua Kurlantzick, examining the curious and surprising persistence of the Communist Party in China despite the formation of a respectably endowed urban middle class, comes to the conclusion that – contrary to the conventional wisdom that the emergence of a middle class facilitates a move toward democracy – the Chinese urban middle classes are actually rather supportive of authoritarian government … because it seems a more reliable protector of their gains.

It seems to me that this is somewhat of the same problem that Obama is facing here, and one of the main reasons that he has been unable to fulfill so many of his campaign promises and – I believe – his own goals: too many who have gained much from the Identity Politics regime of the past forty years do not want to see too much change. And in that, for all practical purposes, such groups are natural (if silent) allies of the wealthy who also do not want to see what they have placed at risk of redistribution.

How Obama can overcome resistance from both sides – as it were – of the current political spectrum, from both remaining sources of the Beltway’s power (Identity Politics and corporate PAC contributions), is a very sobering question indeed.

In that sense, finally, I think Obama is in the same position as the Constitutional ethos itself: it’s under fire from both sides. The Identity Politics advocacies want to see it ‘reformed’ in order to remove its obstacles to their politically useful ‘politics and ethics of caring’ while the law-and-order Rightists want to see it diluted so as to ensure more ‘order’ than the traditional American vision allows the government police power to impose.

And surely, if the feminist visions of slavering male sex-addicts and the wealthy’s visions of a demanding and enraged and suddenly impoverished citizenry are allowed to run free, then they will both converge in an engorged police state, the better to regulate and control their respective bugbears and nightmares.

And if the Sixties insisted that there were no limits and no bounds and no Shapes to which any individual must conform – either in order to accept an external obligation or to fulfill an interior nature – then after several generations, such an unripened and immature citizenry must be both incapable of governing its government and in need of that government’s police power in order to enforce whatever civil order remains possible.

These are dark trajectories indeed. And the sex-offense mania is one of the darkest trajectories that We have seen … to date. And the government, hiding behind its role as righteous avenger of the ‘victims’ of the ‘enemies’, continues to try to expand itself, using any pretext that it thinks will get by the courts. And of course, a government – and legislators – whose primary justification for laws is ‘we feel it’s a good idea to have this law – Never Mind Why’ … well, that’s not any government that corresponds to the Constitutional vision.

Halley’s suggestions are certainly an excellent place to begin a desperately needed change of course.

NOTES

*My copy of the book is the Princeton University Press edition of 2006.

**With no disrespect to Halley, it’s like reviewing old Soviet history to read her enlightening list of assorted feminisms: power feminism, governance feminism, cultural feminism, liberal feminism, difference feminism, postcolonial feminism, sex-positive feminism, structuralist feminism, essentialist feminism, social constructivist feminism, convergentist hybrid feminism, divergentist hybrid feminism … one can’t help but think of Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, Old Bolsheviks, Trotskyites, Zinovievists, Narodniks, legal Marxists, primitive accumulationists, polycentrics, Titoists, permanent revolutionists, right deviationists, left deviationists, and a ghostly host of others including, of course, that greatest creator of ghosts, Stalinism. I suppose you could, if you were so inclined, describe this all this as “intense, theoretical productivity”.

***Who may be said to have abandoned the outsider-revolutionary approach, and instead concentrated on changing things from within the government and the major institutions (law schools, the judiciary, universities, and such).

****At one point in this book, Halley refers to Elizabeth – the queen who ruled England in the 1600s … or words to that effect. My immediate thought was that she could simply have said “Elizabeth I” or “Elizabeth I of England” but then it occurred to me that at this point in elite academic history, a substantial amount of her readers (even the Harvard ones) might not be able to place “Elizabeth I” either as to timeframe or place. I am not referring to the Ivy frosh who were recently discovered to reach the hallowed halls secure in the knowledge that Lincoln beat Hitler or the Kaiser and Kennedy followed Roosevelt. But then, they were all men, and dead white men at that.

*****Crews, Frederick. “Follies of the Wise”: Shoemaker-Hoard, Emeryville, CA; 2006. Page 16.

US v. COMSTOCK

I want offer a few thoughts on this US Supreme Court case, especially on the Amicus Curiae Brief submitted by the Cato Institute in favor of the Respondent-Defendant, one Graydon Earl Comstock, Jr. (and others not named).

The text of the Brief is here. It’s only 42 pages long and is actually very readable. As always, I urge readers to get used to reading Court filings. Many times the only opportunity to read such documents among the SO community is when a case is pending involving yourself or somebody you know – and at that point it’s all kind of intimidating. But it’s good to get used to reading them when you’re not under such pressure, just to get a sense of how lawyers and courts think and how they approach a case. When I use page numbers to refer to the Brief, they will be the page numbers as they appear on the pdf that the hyperlink in this paragraph will take you to.

This case involves the federal government’s authority under Title 18 of the US Code, Section 4248, to civilly commit a “sexually dangerous person” ) who has finished a sentence in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons “or against whom all criminal charges have been dismissed solely for reasons relating to the mental condition of the person”. It should come as no surprise to know that this initiative was part of the Adam Walsh Act.

The way it works is that if a the Attorney General can “certify” that such a person is a “sexually dangerous person” (SDP), send that Notice to the court that tried him, and require thereby a hearing to determine if the person is indeed an SDP, and his release may be delayed until the hearing is held and a decision is reached.

The court may also order a “psychiatric or psychological examination” of the person and a report to be filed. If the court finds “by clear and convincing evidence” that the person is indeed an SDP, then the court can “release the person to the custody of the Attorney General”, who can then approach the State that originally tried him or the State of the person’s residence and get the State to civilly confine him (for “treatment” of course) or, if neither State can or will, then the Attorney General can place the person in “a suitable facility” until such time as the person is declared no longer “sexually dangerous”.

So far so familiar to anybody familiar with the SO mania.

And since there is no specfic 'sex offense' mental illness, there is no diagnosis and no treatment - so you can imagine that a civil commitment for the ostensibly benevolent purposes of 'rehabilitation' might last quite a long time. In the alternative, a person might be clasified as having a 'personality disorder'; a sizable chunk of the entire national population has one sort or another of such a disorder, and since there is a also a category for a personality disorder 'not otherwise specified' - meaning one that conforms to no diagnostic markers known to clinical professionals - then just about anybody can be 'diagnosed' with one by any mental health evaluator who 'sees' such a disorder and writes that opinion up for a court hearing.

As we have seen in many SO laws, but also non-SO laws such as the recent Matthew Shepard Act*, Congress and the Feds are dealing themselves into matters properly the business of the States.

In the Adam Walsh Act (AWA) we saw the Feds use the pretext of Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause to regulate interstate commerce.

In this case, however, the government is trying to establish its power to do this sort of thing under the Necessary and Proper Clause (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 18) of the Constitution, which grants Congress the power to pass all laws “necessary and proper” to carry out those specific enumerated powers assigned to it in the Constitution.

So we come to this Brief. It is from the Cato Institute, a well-known, sorta conservative think-tank in Washington that you wouldn’t at first think would be running around filing Amicus Briefs on behalf of SOs. But what’s going on here is that the government through Congress has now started expanding its alleged authority to deal with SOs so widely that even a conservative think-tank with impeccable credentials is getting worried by the trend.

The Necessary and Proper Clause (N&PC) has always been “tethered to a specific enumerated power”, the Brief points out (p11). If the government is going to use the N&PC as justification and authority, then the government has to identify just what enumerated power within the Constitution its particular plan or law it claims the necessary and proper justification to carry out.

The Government, the Brief politely notes, has identified no such enumerated power by which civil commitment of SDPs is justified.

After all, if the N&PC is not tethered to some particular power that the Constitution has already assigned to Congress, then Congress can make any law it wants about anything, simply on the basis that Congress feels that the law is “necessary and proper’ for Congress to be passing. And that’s the end of any limits on the power of Congress at all. Congress could do whatever it wanted to do and nobody could say No to it because Congress felt that whatever it was doing was ‘necessary and proper’. And do you want Congress as you know it to have that kind of power?

Certainly the Framers didn’t.

That’s why the N&PC is not an independent source of Congressional authority, any more than the Commerce Clause is. Whatever Congress is doing when it uses such a Clause as justification has to be shown to stem directly from one of its Constitutionally enumerated powers.

The government does take a stab at justifying the law: Congress has the right to set up a penal system (p11). Since Congress has the power to pass some criminal laws, says the government, then it must have the right to set up a penal system as well.

But of course that implies that the civil commitment is actually a ‘penalty’, part of the ‘penal system’s power’ – and the whole basic claim about the sex-offense laws is that they are precisely NOT part of any penal system but rather are simply ‘administrative’, ‘regulatory’ and ‘civil’ regulations. Such are the problems a government is going to have when it’s trying to keep this whole SO matrix going – it winds up contradicting itself and surely in this case threatening to undermine the whole matrix altogether.**

For that matter, says the Brief, Congress has no specific enumerated power in the Constitution to be setting up penal systems; criminal law and certainly incarceration are primarily State issues, under the Xth Amendment (which leaves to the States all powers not specifically enumerated for Congress). “The civil commitment of prisoners at the conclusion of their terms has nothing to do with the creation or maintenance of the penal system itself (let alone anything to do with one of Congress’ enumerated powers)”, as the Brief puts it nicely.

But then the Brief stops being quite so vaguely polite. “The true aim of the Act is not to
support the operation of the prison system at all, but to protect the public at large by continuing the confinement of potentially dangerous persons after the conclusion of their sentences. However well intentioned Congress may have been, it had no power to legislate for the purpose of protecting the public from dangerous persons.” (p12).

Now we get to the heart of the matter. We are getting here to the point where it becomes clear just what a Constitutionally impossible (and Constitutionally dangerous) situation is created when the government gets into the ‘protection and prevention’ business.

There is no such specific enumerated power assigned to Congress in the Constitution. And who can be surprised? If the Framers had just waged the Revolutionary War in order to escape from the tyrannical treatment meted out by a royal government that accepted no limits on its authority, were they likely to propose giving their new replacement government the same type of authority?

Heck, it was hard enough for them to allow the States to conduct criminal law, and even then they placed significant protections into the Constitution to prevent the State government authority from lording it over the citizens.

Thus the N&PC limits the federal government (pp16-23). Indeed, Madison said as much on the floor of Congress in 1791: "Whatever meaning this clause may have, none can be admitted, that would give unlimited discretion to Congress". (p23)

I say again what my previous Post worked through at greater length when reflecting on Aya Gruber’s article: a government that is going to ‘protect’ its citizens from any and all sorts of dangerous persons was going to need the authority (and wisdom) of God. And any government with that much power was going to be at great risk of becoming a police-state and reducing its citizenry to a helpless, fearful herd.

So this entire trajectory toward the government – especially the Federal government – ‘protecting’ folks is dangerous and Constitutionally impossible (without gutting the Constitution). But of course, protecting folks has been the great game of the government domestically for decades now; the image of the ‘victim’ has provided the great cover whereby the government could churn out Soviet and Maoist levels of imprisonment, and increasing levels of surveillance and intrusiveness.

But it’s also strange that at a time when Congress has clearly been failing in its most important Constitutional duties (war-making decisions, economic and currency matters) it has simultaneously been seeking to expand its authority (and that of the police power) in ways never intended by the Constitution.

And if Congress is going to now consider itself responsible for broad, profoundly deep, and rapid cultural change and indeed for changing the deepest attitudes and beliefs of the citizenry, and regulate sex as well, then its very objectives will require a level of intrusiveness – precisely unlimited – that cannot but alter the very basis as well as the balance of the Constitutional ethos.

I read in some other commentary the opinion that the Supreme Court – in the commentator’s view – would not and could not approve the government’s plan on the basis of the N&PC, but would probably come up with some other angle to justify approving it.

Perhaps so, alas. But I think this clearly demonstrates that the law-and-order approach as it has evolved over the past few decades can no longer with any accuracy be labeled a ‘conservative’ position. Nor can the pressure for further government intrusiveness be in any sense be labeled ‘liberal’.

The great challenge facing the country now is that both so-called conservative and so-called liberal policies require the expansion of the police power and the expansion of Congressional and federal authority far beyond what the balanced mechanism of the Constitutional machinery and vision permit. Neither of the major political approaches in this country are really pro-Constitution.

And this has been going on for so long that the Bush-era skullduggery can legitimately be seen not as the cause of this dangerous state of affairs, but rather as the fruit of the prior decades’ worth of anti-Constitutional deconstruction by both Parties and their assorted pressure-groups and ‘bases’.

And the matrix of SO laws (themselves the further enhancement of the Domestic Violence initiatives and the entire victimist approach) place the SO community on the very front lines of resistance and make the SO community one of the most active resources for whatever correction and repair that it is still possible to be made.

So there is much at stake here. And much to do.

NOTES

*See my Post here.

**Because if these laws are declared “punitive” (and more courts are starting to come to that conclusion) then they can’t be made retroactive. And, for that matter, such judicial determinations may also implicate the hugely suspicious inclusion of the military justice system as a court system whose convictions have the type of Constitutional integrity that justify making military court convictions for sex-offenses eligible for inclusion on the sex-offender registries. Things get complicated when you start trying to do a lot of stuff without really thinking anything through (and can you say Iraq War?).

ADDENDUM

The text of 18 US Code 4248 is here.

TERRORISM AND SATAN'S SILENCE

Back in 2006 in ‘The New Republic’ the noted legal commentator Cass Sunstein reviewed several books about terrorism. *

As often happens in even well-intentioned campaigns nowadays, the dangers of this or that can be greatly exaggerated in comparison to the actual risk that they pose. In the same year that 3,000 Americans died in the 9-11 bombings, 40,000 died in motor vehicle accidents, and an American was 15 times more likely to die in an MVA than in a terrorist attack, and 7 times more likely to die of alcohol-related problems. In fact, he calculated, “if an attack of the magnitude of September 11 occurred every three months for the next five years … the probability of being killed in such an attack would remain tiny: 0.02.”

And yet the ‘fears’ of Americans do not correspond to the statistical realities. More Americans are greatly worried about their loved ones dying in a terrorist attack than are fearful of a loved one’s death by MVA or alcohol.

One of the reviewed books identified a ‘complex’ of government bureaucracies, politicians, and the media as the source of much of the fear-mongering; each of them benefits greatly from public fear. He fails to go beyond the usual suspects to include those elements of allegedly ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ origin that have also become adept at fear-mongering.

Advocates often have to emphasize the ‘danger’ posed by their ‘enemies’ in order to weld together disparate sub-demographics of their adherents. And there is always that ancient tactic that the Russians called prebedniatsia, the purposeful exaggeration of your claim or your plight in order to gain the attention of a bored official or bureaucrat (apparatchik). In this country, you want to make your own case stand out in order to attract the attention of the politicians and bureaucrats and media; but you want to instill fear in the citizenry so that they will sympathize with you – support you even – in the hopes that supporting you will reduce their ‘danger’.

It would be wiser, Sunstein notes, simply to sit down and do some quick figuring: the question isn’t whether you are ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’, but rather: what is the probability of X happening to me or my loved ones? This, Sunstein and the various authors realize, would add a major reality check to much of the fear-induced stampeding that has befogged and besplattered the national landscape in the past few decades. After all, if everyone yields to anxious rumination about whether they are ‘safe’ or not, who would be able to get out of bed in the morning and face the day (without the assistance of mood-enhances, quarts of energy drinks, or what-have-you)?

This, of course, is precisely not the approach taken by assorted advocacies and the government: the false question – am I safe? – taps into abiding fears, and not simply specific fears but also the deep and dark pool of anxiety that is ‘down there’ in every human being, just waiting to be given a vent up to the surface of consciousness.

Sunstein examines political philosopher Robert Goodin’s core description of ‘terrorists’: they “act with the intention of frightening people for their own political purposes”. Whether they actually shed blood or how much or how little they shed is not the core element in their definition; rather, it is that they are deliberately trying to frighten folks in order to achieve their political purposes.

That actually sounds like a pretty solid bit of description. Until it dawns on you that it fits a rather significant chunk of Beltway folk such as advocates and politicians (not always the media, who more often do it for sales, not purely for ‘political purposes’).

But Sunstein can’t completely agree, and rightly so. Surely there is a difference between persons looking to instill fear and gain political compliance by bombs and bloodshed, and persons seeking to gain their political purposes by non-bloody (not to say non-violent) means.

I make that little distinction between non-bloody and non-violent since you can do quite a bit of damage to an individual, a group, a society, a culture, or a nation without necessarily shedding any blood at all (yes, I’m thinking of the SO mania, among other things).

Nor does Goodin make such a vivid but wayyyy too –simplified and wayyyy too-easy equation between terrorists and politicos. Rather, he says, “it follows that public officials, frightening people for their own ends, are to that extent terrorists, even if the underlying threat is real, and even if they are not responsible for creating the threat in the first place”.

Biff! Pow! And this is in the context of the 9-11 terrorism that Goodin is speaking: there really are violent terrorists out there, the Beltway didn’t create them, but the Beltway is fomenting fear in order to achieve its own political ends and its own political success and continuance.

But then: what if the Beltway did create the threat, and what if the Beltway continues to sustain the threat for its own political ends? Now, as you may have guessed, we are getting much closer to the SO mania with the monstrous, incorrigible, stranger sex-offender (duly Certified by official Finding) and the public constantly whipped up into fear because hordes of these ravenous wolves are allegedly roaming the landscape.

By Goodin’s definition, this is most genuinely a case of terrorism. Perhaps we might call it terrorism under color of law: on the basis of their public authority, elected officials and bureaucrats are deliberately fomenting public fear and anxiety, even though the evidence is clear that the ‘threat’ is hugely exaggerated and statistically negligible. And that’s even before you start wondering if the ‘threat’ is actually more ‘invented’ than ‘actual’.

I use historical material quite a bit on this site. There’s a reason for it: whereas material that’s current can be vivid, there’s no way to know if it actually describes a situation accurately.

Whereas a slightly older bit of material – something from within your own lifetime (or mine, anyway) – allows you to look at things with some perspective. So for example I chose the 1995 Poritz case to do an 11-Post series about, because 1995 isn’t all that long ago, and yet it’s long enough ago so that a reader can judge for him/herself just how much of the Poritz vision was accurate.

And in that regard, I came across a bunch of material** on the pre-school trials of the early 1980s (although the McMartin case – cause of the longest trial in US history, 7 years – was not resolved until 1990). Since a lot of you may have reached consciousness before the 1980s, I am including in the Notes some links to material that I found in conjunction with the 1995 book “Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt”.

I’ll let the material in those links speak for itself. You’ll find a lot of the evidentiary corruption, investigative misfeasance and malfeasance, and incredible obtuseness (or duplicity) on the part of some judges and prosecutors.

But you’ll also note the literally outlandish assertions made by these toddlers (after questioning by ideological experts and prosecutors). They are so outlandish that it stuns to imagine that any public official would have dared to air them in modern-day America. But the prosecutors did, and for a while there was quite a bit of public agitation … and at least 50 adults went to prison (not a few of them female) on the basis of no-evidence but simply on the phantasmagorical word of these children.

This was in America of the 1980s, hardly the ‘old days’, and yet before the bar of history this era has no right to snigger at the addled villagers of 17th-century Salem.

Reading this material, I think the SO community can refresh a sense of just how crazy – literally – a substrate flows just beneath the surface of things even in this oh-so-modern and enlightened era. But also how quickly the public can snap out of it if given a chance to count-to-ten. (Which hasn’t happened so quickly nowadays because, I would say, back then there was no element of Beltway political influence, which only began to flex with the Domestic Violence and Sex Offense campaigns of the early 1990s.)

And you will notice again in this material that awful confluence, that alliance, between elements and advocacies of the Left and the law-and-order fundamentalism of the Right. (Don’t forget: the pre-school cases centered around ‘ritual Satanic abuse’ – providing a hook for anti-sex, anti-male and anti-‘Satan’ interests.)

Looking at it now, you can almost see the seams and stitches by which this Frankenstein’s monster of a ‘threat’ was put together, almost according to spec.

This unholy alliance, grounded only in the sure and certain outcome that the Big Government police power would get even Bigger, survived the opprobrium of having fomented the pre-school crisis, and in almost no time was back for the Domestic Violence campaign and then – most recently – the Sex Offense mania.

This unholy ‘alliance’ is the biggest monster and the biggest threat, feeding on the fear of the people and its own ideological craziness.

Our era seems less and less rational, less and less mature, less and less sane as time goes on.

NOTES

*Cass R. Sunstein, ‘The Case for Fear’, in ‘The New Republic’, December 11, 2006, pp. 29-33.

** First, an article from the Counterpunch about mainstream feminist silence in the face of the pre-school trials. Second, a site about the Fells Acres saga in Massachusetts. Third, a review by noted mania researcher Philip Jenkins of the 1995 book “Satan’s Silence: The Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt”.