EQUALS WHAT?

Now comes one Carolyn Cook, described as the “Washington representative for the ERA Campaign Network”. She was recently allowed space in ‘The Philadelphia Inquirer’ to plump for the ERA.

For those readers who have joined Us recently, the ERA Amendment was put forth in 1972, the year that the Democrats formally unveiled themselves as the “Party of Women” (in George McGovern’s candid phrase). It was to be a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing “equality of rights under the law” to women and guaranteeing that nobody would be “discriminated against on the basis of sex”.

The first thought that came to my mind is that at this point it would appear that “men” might need such a guarantee more than – ummmmm – any other sex or gender. But that would be to jump down into the pit, and going further downward isn’t what the country needs right now – public discourse is debased enough as it is.

The piece starts off by pointing out that the Declaration of Independence, which is seen as controlling the interpretation of the Constitution, was whomped up by “56 white, male landowners representing 13 colonies”. This might possibly have been ‘news’ – or at least an interesting ‘take’ on the Founding documents back in 1972. It isn’t now. It’s like being in a time-warp.

The situation is intolerable, the piece is getting to, because the composition of the Framing group “is hardly representative of America today”. Yes and no. The Framers were consciously trying to speak for all humanity, and speak to all History, by incorporating principles that had been evolving throughout Western history toward the landmark moment in 1776 (followed by the Constitution in 1787) when one nation would be founded purely on the high principles that had been evolving piecemeal throughout the previous two millennia.

And while in one sense America is ‘different’ now in the sense that there are more than educated, land-owning white males in town, yet that ‘difference’ seems far less significant than the commonality that remains: America was founded as a country where all human beings were created equal. Whether the human beings are brownish, yellowish, reddish, whitish, or equipped with one type of plumbing instead of another does not change the principles.

So it seems strange that this concern about ‘white males’ is considered somehow crucially significant.

But a clue to what is being left unsaid, and what is going on beneath the surface, is provided a couple of lines further on in the piece: “With only one justice and a quarter of judges in state courts female, the odds are not in our favor”. Oy. Oy gevalt.

What is the significance of the gender of a judge such that having only a quarter of them female means that “the odds” are not in "our" favor? Is this the tip of a berg characterizable as: A judge will decide cases according to that judge’s gender? If this characterization is accurate, then the country is in a heap of trouble.

Or is this characterization what the ERA lobby would like to see happen? In which case, if We go along with them, this country is in a heap of trouble. And who is this “our”? Americans? Or just “women”? Or, more likely, just the “women” who support what the ERA is trying to pull here? Is it starting to become clear, how divisive this whole ‘gender’ (or ‘sex’) Identity is? Being ‘American’ is no longer to be the primary identifier for – theoretically, according to the Ideological Feminists whose handiwork I think I see here – 51% of the American population. This house is most certainly divided, is it not?

But what precisely are the “rights” and what precisely constitutes this “equality” of which the lobbyists speak? This I think is the real land-mine being planted under nice-looking verbal greenery. There has taken root in American legal and constitutional thought (as it were) the weedy distinction between Formal Equality and (something verrrry new and different) Substantive Equality. *

‘Formal Equality’ meant an equal treatment under the laws and an equality of opportunity. It is the ‘classic’ or ‘traditional’ concept and definition of American commitment to ‘rights’ and ‘equality’; you were to be free from government tyranny and free to give life a shot as best you could.

But ‘Substantive Equality’ has been developed only in the past few decades (during the same timeframe as Identity and Gender politics, by some coincidence). ‘Rights’ are entitlements and protections granted by the government, and are judged by the result that they lead to. If the results for some group turn out to be different from another group then that must constitute proof – the theory goes – that the government must ‘do whatever it takes’ (if I might borrow the candid Israeli phrase) to change the results and make them more ‘equal’.

The entire relationship between The People and the government is changed. And since the Founding documents (the Declaration and the Constitution) were put together by “white males” then according to the new theory those documents are suspect and fungible from the get-go. This, I submit, is going to lead to something other than a Constitutional Republic.

Nathanson and Young note as well that “the ultimate model of quality of result is Marx’s classless society, in which personal merit has little or nothing to do with the distribution of wealth”. I’m only secondarily concerned here with the distribution of wealth; my concern here is that the whole scheme is antithetical to the functioning and politics of a Constitutional Republic; and the fact that the whole scheme is essentially Marxist with ‘gender’ substituted for ‘class’ doesn’t make me feel any less apprehensive. The late Mr. Marx may have been a nice man and for all We know might be in heaven at this moment, but his ideas have resulted in untold catastrophe for hundreds of millions, and his was not the brightest chapter in the history of political theory.

Worse, the only way to achieve such equality of result is precisely by not applying laws equally, by not applying “the same rules in the same way to the all citizens as individuals” (Nathanson and Young again). And yet, in Our still-kicking democracy, the government must lie to (at least half of) its own People and insist that it is applying the laws equally; and government lying ... who needs to give any government yet another excuse to lie?

And the original equality of opportunity meshed nicely with classical Liberal theory. But equality of result comes from another political world altogether; there is nothing ‘Liberal’ about it; it is a statist mechanism. And when introduced into as complexly designed a matrix as the American Constitutional system then the implementation of such a mechanism cannot but be revolutionary. And ‘revolution’ doesn’t inhabit the same conceptual, operational, political, or moral space as a Constitutional and democratic politics.

I keep wondering how the frak We got here forty years or so later. I think that the original stated aim was that women (again, I’m speaking about what the self-proclaimed ‘advocates’ of females claimed, not about all female citizens) wanted to get into the job market. OK, that was no Constitutional problem (although in the US of the 1970s, with its declining industrial economy, it may have been arguably an unwise economic path to take).

But then something else got rolling, a different dynamic. ‘Women’, according to the Ideological Feminists (IFs) who proclaimed themselves the ‘advocates’ of all females in the country, were just the same as men and could not be seen to be different. Well, OK. But somehow so very many seemed to still remain attached to – well – ‘babies’ ... having them and raising them.

Now that was a complication: conceptually as well as organizationally. Didn’t the IFs insist that women were just like men, only with different bodies? What then was this continuous brouhaha that women who wanted jobs also wanted babies? Were women somehow ‘connected to’ babies in such a way that made having-a-job just way too much for one person – and her production-minded employer – to handle?

This, I think, was the huge disconnect that came to be unmentionable. The Dems couldn’t go near it because they had already made up their mind to give “women” – or really the IFs who claimed to represent them – carte blanche in order to secure the ‘women’s vote’, or at least the support of the IF lobby. The media, having tasted the blood of exciting ‘advocacy journalism’ were in no mood to go back to the boring old corral of ‘objective and factual reporting’, nor did the media bosses want to annoy a ‘customer’ base equaling 51% of the population.

So the matter never really was aired thoroughly. And yet the government kept having to twist itself and its construal and application of the laws into pretzels in order to work around this monstrous disconnect – that ‘women’, as opposed to their ‘advocates’, seemed to want both jobs and babies, and had been led now to expect that the Dems and the government they controlled would make it happen.

Nor did it appear that it was only ‘straight’ women who were evincing a deep, almost visceral (and therefore politically incorrect) attachment to having babies. Lesbians too seemed to evince the same attachments – which seemed to imply that Nature had evolved some deep and complex matrix within the female that not only was attuned to having babies but actually required the having of babies. And to notice THAT was to invite political and professional death; and was not often done.

But if Nature (and its daughter, Evolution) had so gone about designing females, then that of course could lead to justifiable speculation to the effect that maybe the ‘old’ approach to divvying up the chores in Western civilization (and many other world civilizations) might have been the right way to go. And to follow THAT string into the dark forest was also to invite political and professional death.

Nor could the Dems, having committed to ripping down any and all walls in the national House, now admit that there were such monstrous conceptual and actual warning signs that it might not have been a good idea, that it might even wind up proving to be a lethal or even a fatal idea.

And you still really can’t talk about it very openly.

Yet it is a stubborn actuality at the very center of domestic events, and has been so for decades.

Nor do I think you can really make the case that ‘gender’ is just another category like ‘race’. The ‘racial’ category is provably a chimera – there is no difference genetically between human beings of different races. There do seem to be, however, some very deep, clear, and robust differences between the genders. Ask yourself, if you’re in a burning building with two broken legs, if you’d like a perky female fireperson coming up the ladder to try to carry you down, or a more ‘quaint’ and ‘traditional’ fireman.

And there’s that having-babies thing, which I am starting to think is even more significant than the profound issue of females aborting ... whatever the government cares to call those little critters.

And it can be no coincidence that while historically all Americans (with the exception, back there half a century ago, of the benighted Southrons) could agree that denying ‘the Negro’ full civil rights and equality of opportunity was somehow not only wrong but antithetical to the American vision, there exists no such consensus as to just what – beyond political civil rights and the opportunities thus afforded - would constitute ‘full equality’ and ‘rights’ for ‘women’. Surely the sempiternal national argument over abortion ‘rights’ is clear evidence of that.

Nor can such argument be written off as ‘merely’ ‘backlash’ or evidence of some gender-wide, world-historical male plan to ruin women’s day. **

So what is this “equality” that only the ERA can provide? It seems like such a harmless, and indeed worthy, word - “equality”. But I think that the landmine is hidden right in there, in the way that Nathanson and Young have talked about: there are different conceptions of “equality” now, and the one that those who ‘get it’ plan to implement is hell-and-gone from the one that the rest of Us understand and that was built into the Constitution.

And those who ‘get it’ are spending all their days and nights figuring how to subvert what everybody else – in what little spare time and attention they can manage – assume that NO American government would ever piss away: the Constitutional heritage, securely anchored in the machinery of government “of the People, by the People, for the People”.

But it gets worse. As I said above, the word “equality” is the suspicious baggage here: it is not packed the way any average citizen would imagine, with Formal equality (of opportunity). Instead, it is sneakily packed with the suspicious, new, and hidden Substantive equality (of result).

So passing the ERA for the sake of “equality” is really a back-door solution to introducing into the core of Constitutional government and practice an entirely new, Constitution- and democracy-unfriendly ‘theory’ and ‘definition’ of Equality that, as noted above, will further derange the already-battered Constitutional ethos upon which this nation is based. Think ‘The Patriot Act’, which so many folks figured was just a way for the government to go after ‘terrorists’ and has turned out to be one heck of a lot more, and not much of it in Our common interest.

Once again, a highly-focused interest group, the Ideological Feminists (whose ideas, alas, are now pretty much the whole of what passes for ‘feminism’ in Beltway-land), are doing that revolutionary end-run around democratic politics, popular and public deliberation, and – let’s face it – around The People. This bunch is not democracy-friendly and does not have the best interests of all of the American people at heart, nor is it committed to the founding vision of this country.

But it gets even worse than that. I think that passage of the ERA without serious discussion and definition of just what this “equality” means is also a backdoor effort to reduce the political and perhaps legal liability of all the pols who for decades now have supported this anti-democratic assault in order to further and preserve their own interests and jobs; think of the ERA as they’re currently trying to spin it as the Ideological Feminist equivalent of the Military Commissions Act and the Telecommunications Act: it will serve to provide ‘immunity’ for all the pols who have betrayed the common weal by indulging the revolutionary programme of the IFs for all these years. After all, if “equality” as it is meant in the ERA becomes part of the Constitution itself through the Amendment process, then none of the pols can be held responsible for betraying their responsibility to the Constitution or for doing anything unconstitutional. Verrrrry shrewd. Verrrrry sleazy.

We need to be very careful here. True and genuine Citizens kick tires without apology or fear.

Let Us start kicking.

NOTES

*For a fuller discussion of this see Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young, “Legalizing Misandry” (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press; 2006), on pp. 82-85 and in other places as indicated in the book’s Index under the headings “equality of opportunity” and “equality of result”.

**Can anyone honestly accept that for millennia males have been going to classes to learn how to discriminate against women? That at some point back there in history all the males, just out of pure meanness or whatever dark motives, got together and decided to overthrow the women-based hierarchical utopia under which all the tribes on the still-primitive planet are presumed to have been living? This is not, I say here, some subtle way of suggesting that Kinder, Kuche, und Kirche was the best and only way to arrange society – but surely things evolved historically in a more complex way than to simply insist that there existed some sort of genderistic Big Bang by which ‘men’ suddenly took over and subordinated a highly-functioning female-controlled tribe, or all of the tribes on the planet at once. But, of course, complexity and accuracy are gall and wormwood to ‘revolutions’ – and no revolution will permit complexity and accuracy to interfere with its urgent impositions.

LAW NATURALLY

In ‘The New York Times’ Charles Morris reviews a just-published book by the just-deceased Richard John Neuhaus; the book is entitled “American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile”. I have not yet read the book (it’s on my buy-now list), but Morris – himself an accomplished author on things religious and spiritual – has raised enough worthwhile points in his review that I’ll offer a few thoughts.

Neuhaus traces a mutation in American religio-political thought stretching back at least to Walt Whitman and John Dewey: whereas the pre-Civil War American self-conception was that the nation (and its political principles and structure) were the expression of a genuine gift from God to humanity and the world’s peoples, Whitman “secularized” that – America was indeed “special” and even “exceptional”, and gloriously so, but not because God had raised it up but rather just because American and Americans were so marvelously ‘special’ on their own. (And the world’s peoples, and History, it was presumed, would just have to accept that, unless they were all as dumb as dirt and as stubborn as mules.)

Dewey, a moralizing thinker rather than a poet like Whitman, limned the whole approach in the shape of ‘serious thinking’: America is an entity with goals of its own. Those goals weren’t given from on high but were rather evolved from the marvelous American thing itself. But since “all goals come with an ‘ought’”, then those goals had to be realized. (Again, the world’s peoples apparently were well-advised to get used to that; Americans were here, they were special, and everybody else better get used to it – and, by the by, give thanks for their good luck in having Americans around.)

You can see the Flattening effect here. Instead of being anchored in some Gift from Beyond, America was anchored not only in material ‘nature’, but in its own self-definitions. Yet – oy! – that self-definition carried some force of ‘ought’, of ‘law’ even, in History. Imagine America as claiming to be the solid base of all the world’s moral striving, yet itself not anchored to anything but instead sort of free-floating in its own self-definition and self-conception, however those might change as Time and History went on. Such an ‘unanchored anchor’ – if I may – might seem a kind of too-free-floating and unreliable ‘rock’ on which to base the Modern age around the world.

But the Progressive take on Dewey was that his vision was fluid, dynamic, and capable of countenancing the massive ‘creative destruction’ that would sweep away an old world like whatever-it-was that did away with the dinosaurs and usher in a bright new Age of Man (generically understood, of course). One might be justified in ejaculating a long and loud Wheeeeeeeeee!

Morris observes – rightly – that “Neuhaus’s brand of natural law comes from the Greeks, and especially Aristotle”. True enough, from the narrow approach of tracing its intellectual roots. I think it’s essential to go a bit deeper here: The Greeks and Aristotle, and they weren’t the first, applied a particularly conceptual approach to a reality that marked all humans and their societies and cultures as they evolved in the last few millennia of ‘recorded History’: all of them were trying to give expression to a universally felt awareness, i.e. that humans were in the presence of some Life that existed Beyond the particular shape of this dimension.

So when certain current philosophies or political dogmas – such as ‘deconstruction’ and ‘ideological feminism’* - dismiss such natural law thinking as merely the intellectual sleaze of ‘dead white european males’, they are failing to deal with the far more fundamental human reality: human beings have evinced over Time and History a stubborn sense that there is a Beyond and that there are even Presences within that Beyond. The ‘stubborn’ persistence of this sense suggests strongly – and hardly implausibly - that humans do indeed live out their lives in the presence of such a Beyond and its Presences. (Although I grant you that the same type of thinking that Newton used to ‘prove’ gravity cannot be applied to non-material realities such as the Beyond and the Presences themselves.)

That said, Morris is spot-on when he asserts that “most people still think … that morality is not something you just make up”. And as I implied above, it’s a mighty queasy experience to try to ‘anchor’ your entire life and the existence of the entire species on something that’s simply ‘made up’ and that can change without warning.

Along came the philosopher Richard Rorty who died at a ripe age just a couple of years ago. Rorty, a ‘liberal’ as the word is defined nowadays, tried to take the bull by the horns: Yup, folks do indeed just “make up morality” and therefore “there is no way to privilege one citizen’s first principles over any others”.

Well … it’s certainly food for thought. Though I can’t imagine how an orchestra is going to play a symphony if every member in every instrument group can simply adopt a different score to play. Of course, a Conductor can be raised up who will impose a common Score – but in a democracy that opens up a whole other, and verrrry nasty, can of worms.

But that’s pretty much where Rorty and his contemporary, John Rawls, wound up (much to the delight of the revolutionary cadres of ‘revolutionary’ thought among the ideological feminists and the deconstructors and others). You can go the Fascist route and raise up a particular Leader, or you can go the Communist route and raise up an ‘elite’ who ‘gets it’ and who uses the governmental authority to impose its will on everybody in the name of all the people (‘the masses’, as the Commies were fond of calling their donkey-saddled citizenries).

And as We may have noticed in the past forty years, the Communist approach can be draped in the appearances of Democracy, where ‘zealous and revolutionary advocates’ can demand power ‘in the name of the oppressed’; the modern ‘sensitive’ elites are doing it to eradicate ‘pain’ whereas the Commies were doing it to eradicate economic injustice by eradicating the ‘kulaks’ and the ‘bourgeois’ and the ‘intelligentsia’ as a class. If there is any ‘class’ in America nowadays that has been assigned to fill in for the ‘bourgeois’ and the ‘intelligentsia’, it would have to be ‘men’, and perhaps ‘religiously inclined thinkers and believers’.

“Political dialogue is shot through with shared notions of right and wrong.” Yes. The great gamble of a revolution is in trying to shortcut the ‘sharing’ and simply substitute a ‘new’ Grand Notion for the old ‘shared’ notion. The faster that can be done, the better a chance the revolution has; conversely, the longer it takes, the greater the risk that folks might take it upon themselves to kick the tires of the revolution. Lenin and Stalin saw that, so did Hitler – and so did Mussolini, but Italians are just too anchored in actuality to go gaga over ‘new ideas’, let alone a new ‘Grand Idea’.

But just how do the notions come to be ‘shared’? It’s one thing to insist that they’re ‘shared’ because humans simply assembled them and can change them. It's another thing to assert that they’re shared because the Beyond covers everybody and the ‘notions’ reflect, however imperfectly, the hidden centripetal reality of the Beyond’s influence in this dimension.

Again, the same science that discovered gravity can’t be made to work in this type of ‘physics’ (which is why they’ve called it ‘metaphysics’ for quite some time). But then, the fact that cargo cult islanders couldn’t pick up radio-waves with coconut shells doesn’t mean that radio waves didn’t or don’t exist. We’re all cargo cult islanders when it comes to the ‘radio waves’ of the Beyond – although standing on the shoulders of Aristotle and the medieval theologians actually gives Us a better shot than a lot of folks might nowadays care to think.

Rorty, as Morris notes, asserted that since – as he assumed – there is no ‘There there’ out in the Beyond, then the only position a smart, progressive, ‘hip’ liberal could take is that of the “liberal ironist”. The irony of the ironist position is this: everybody (at least everybody who ‘gets it’) knows that a) human beings need to feel like their lives are anchored in principles but at the same time b) there ARE NO PRINCIPLES – or at least none that anybody can be sure of, that anybody can ‘prove’ are reely reely anchored in the nature of a reality set up and presided over by the Beyond.**

So the liberal, progressive, ‘elite’ trick will be to pretend that your principles are solidly enough anchored to give your life and your morality some meaning while ‘really’ knowing deep deep down that there are no such solid principles (and that consequently your life is like a blob of gelatin floating on a stormy, trackless ocean of meaninglessness). And for the donkey-minded masses, they can go on actually believing in a Beyond – after all, religion is the “opiate of the masses” as a great revolutionary thinker once assured the world.

And of course, by getting rid of your opposition – popes, priests, anybody who stands up for the Beyond or at least tries to – then you are free to make sure that it is your Notion that is ‘shared’ by the masses. Not a terribly original scheme, but it’s worked before in this world – at least for a while.

In a by-the-by that stuns with its revelation of just how witless a bonafide, card-carrying cutting-edge ‘intellectual’ can be, Morris relates Neuhaus’s retelling of the Princeton University bioethicist, Peter Singer. Singer has been barred from speaking at German universities since the Wall came down, because he proposed that “defective” children be destroyed “during a trial period after their births”. It was pointed out to him that that was precisely the Nazi plan for clearing the “defective” undergrowth out of the healthy forest of the German Volk (which they actually carried out until Bishop Galen of Munster raised such a hullaballoo that they had to stop it). Somehow, Singer managed to become “especially upset” that anyone would even bring all that up, since he had lost relatives in the Holocaust.

Apparently Singer the storied intellectual assumed a) that he didn’t need to really think his ideas through, b) that actual human historical experience had nothing to do with his ideas, and c) that since he was a second-tier victim of the Holocaust then nobody had the right to increase his ‘pain’ by disagreeing with his ideas. Such are the complications of too-little thinking by elite types who think that their every intellectual burp is a deep thought ready to be imposed on the waiting donkeys.

Morris, alas, still has to keep his own union card, so he finds fault with Neuhaus in the matter of Roe v. Wade (about – you know – abortion as a doable do). Morris accuses Neuhaus of charging that the country never got a chance to really debate the abortion issue after (let alone before) Roe; Morris points to a 2008 South Dakota referendum which was passed, calling for “rule-based access to abortion”.

But “rule-based access to abortion” – the idea that there can be rules that narrowly limit abortions to actual life-threatening danger to the mother, that abortions cannot be performed after fetal viability - are accepted by a sizable percentage of citizens. What a very large percentage does not agree with is ‘abortion’ as a ‘private’ health-and-lifestyle matter to be decided between the woman and her doctor and nobody else, the father and the State included.

I’d say that there’s no decisive support for the current position of the feminist ‘elites’ that abortion is a) nobody’s business but the individual woman’s and b) it ‘ain’t but a thang’ anyway.

But if prior maneuvering is any indicator, the revolutionary devil will have been hidden in the details, and through the skullduggerous collaboration of willing intellectuals, jurists, and legislators, the voters of the Great State of South Dakota will shortly find that they have been snookered as the advocate-cadres go to work on ‘implementation’ in the State capitol (which I should remember from 5th grade geography but don’t).

While some religious traditions have managed to make room for some amount of abortion – under certain circumstances – there isn’t a great deal of religious support for ‘abortion at will’ or abortion as merely a lifestyle choice just a little more significant than getting Botoxed.

To those who ‘get it’, of course, such complexity is merely ‘thinking too much’, and in the service of ‘patriarchy’ – defined as a violent programme of world-historical proportions. (Sort of like – by amazing coincidence – what Marx said Capitalism was.)

One wonders, from time to time: if ‘men’ are as violent and evil as they have been made out to be by certain groups, and if the said ‘men’ have been that way since that pre-Pharaonic age of the Great Goddes(es), then how is it that by the Year of Grace One Thousand Nine Hundred and Seventy or thereabouts, there were still alive and taking nourishment in this country sufficient numbers of ‘women’ as to constitute that tempting 51% of the population that so seduced the desperate Democrats into imagining that they could weld to their Party a huge and reliable majority of the American citizenry, all for the price of ‘merely’ allowing the demonization and denigration of ‘men’ as a class, using as weapons the full legislative, justicial, police, and media resources of the nation? ***

Or is that thinking too much?

Well, at this point of course, such questions might be seen as Politburo debates about ‘how we got to this point’ and ‘what we can do now’ in 1990.

Or not.

Maybe something might still be done to work for the common weal – or, to put it ‘quaintly’, for all the citizens.

And – who can say? – maybe there is a Beyond, and maybe ‘It’ loves all humans, and maybe We can hoist up what little canvas the ship can still bear and bring her back before the Wind.

NOTES

*As always, when I speak of ‘ideological feminism’ I am not referring to all female human beings in their thoughts and preferences, but rather to a particular cadre – the ‘base’ of ‘feminism’ – that has been pursuing, under all manner of guises, a purely political agenda in this country and elsewhere in the West for the past forty years or so. Nor, if I take issue with that ‘ideology’, am I taking a swipe at the interests or ‘pain’ of all female human beings.

**This is exactly the point about which Pope Benedict XVI spoke clearly in his recent address to the faculties of the University of Regensburg: that the Church has always taught that human reason, helped along by the Holy Spirit, can reach into and grasp (however incompletely) the reality of a cosmos presided over by an all-powerful, loving Grace (or: God).

***All this despite the fact, among others, that while 44% of gays report violence in their domestic relationship, 57% of lesbians do or that while 22% of men admit to resorting to violence against their partners, 38% of women do. And while the PC explanation of this is that many women are conditioned by patriarchy, that explanation neither limns a very impressive prospect for female agency and initiative, nor does it seem to explain how ‘men’ are the sole (and evil) core of the problem of violence in relationships. And perhaps it has something to do with testosterone; thus perhaps the lesbians proving more violence-prone than the gays. But if so, then both sexes and both the straight and gay orientations have testosterone in their systems (albeit in different amounts and with different effects).

So the national policy – if there is to be one – should be concerned with testosterone’s consequences on people, not with a ‘war’ of one gender upon another, AND with the government – on top of everything else – taking sides. The reports are discussed on p. 244 of Nathanson and Young’s “Legalizing Misandry” (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press; 2006); the entire book is worth the read, and I’ll be doing a Post when I’ve finished reflecting upon it.

Moreover, sex-assaultive adolescent males who as children were themselves abused by females, uniformly chose female victims. Which indicates a monstrous amount of female-abuse-of-male-children behind the seemingly ‘ultimate’ reality of males assaulting females sexually. (See p.257 of “Legalizing”.) So there is a universe of suppressed information buried behind the headlines. And the absence of that crucial information fuels the lethally misguided uproar against males; an uproar that the self-proclaimed “Party of Women” needs to think rather seriously about, I would say – and sooner rather than later.

POLICE STATES, LAW SCHOOLS

Marjorie Cohn, always worth the read, discusses the stream of Bush-era Memoranda now coming to light. From a legal point of view, she observes, their contents form what is effectively “the definition of a police state”.

Yes, they do. And she is right as rain when she asserts, with refreshing candor, that the attorneys who produced them – one still on the faculty of a law school, another a Federal judge – should be “investigated, prosecuted, and disbarred” and the Federal judge “impeached”. From her lips to God’s ear.

But in that same pile of reading I came across a review of a book by the aged public intellectual, John Lukacs. In his book Lukacs complains – with justification – of “the rise of a militaristic political conservatism in the United States”.

And they both get me to thinking.

First, no genuine American conservative can be militaristic. Nobody who is seeking to ‘conserve’ the spirit and fundament of the Constitution can at the same time embrace militarism. The present American Right is indeed militaristic. But then again the present American Right is not in any useful sense of the word ‘conservative’. It is a Rightist nationalist politics more aptly described as akin to the early-20th century European Rightist parties.

But then again too, the American Left cannot be described with any accuracy as ‘Liberal’. Especially as it indentured itself to the revolutionary, Marx-tinged, ideological feminism of the day and to the Rawlsian approval of “elites” who would be justified in doing an end-run around a democratic politics, then the American Left ceased to be ‘Liberal’ and became ‘revolutionary’ – and ‘revolution’ is not in any way, shape, or form ‘Liberal’.

Chris Floyd courageously enough points out that Bill Clinton’s “triage” strategy consisted of “adopting a slew of right-wing policies and simply calling them ‘progressive’”. And he’s accurate in that, as far as he goes.

But again: Clinton – the toxicity of whose Administration to Law and Constitution has yet to be fully plumbed – was seeking not only to placate the Right. He was also politically in thrall to that ideological feminism whose revolutionary agenda and methods, shrewdly draped in the home-grown ‘philosophy’ of John Rawls, sought quick and unquestioned imposition of its demands upon the whole of American society and culture. Law and Constitution – so tainted by patriarchy – could take the hindmost.

So then the question again: what are they teaching in American law schools now? And for the past twenty or even thirty years?

Communitarianism? The assertion that the rights of the individual must always give way to the rights of the community, or to the demands of the community? How well will that prepare an attorney to appreciate the Constitution?

Critical Legal Studies? This general approach that holds a) that there is no Law to which all laws must conform; b) that all laws are merely the expression of a power-play in which those with power institutionalize their oppression of those without power; c) that the sole aim of all laws is to empower those without power; d) that this empowerment is an overriding goal of law; e) that in any situation where there are powerless elements in a citizenry, such lack constitutes sufficient ‘emergency’ so as to override any other legal or philosophical or prudential consideration, and thus also such ‘emergency’ precludes the dubious and time-consuming procedures of a deliberative, democratic politics.

Social Constructionism? That there are no lasting or essential actual differences in any categories that a society or culture employs when making its laws, and thus that no such non-existent ‘differences’ can be used as a justification (or really ‘pretext’ and ‘excuse’) for laws that result in different (read: unequal) outcomes for anybody. Thus ‘race’ and ‘age’ and ‘gender’ are all the same: merely mental constructs embraced by a citizenry, and which may be ‘changed’ – and quickly, through the impositions of those elites who ‘get it’ and can ‘see’ beyond such illusions.

Victimism? The general approach holds a) that persons who believe themselves victimized in any way are therefore incontestably victims and that therefore their claims cannot be doubted; b) that victims by definition cannot lie or be mistaken about their victimization; c) that victims by definition cannot victimize anybody else by not-telling the truth; d) that the role of legislation is to give such persons the greatest relief possible without the delay of deliberation, which – because of the ‘illusions’ of social construction (see immediately above) – would be tainted and useless anyway; e) that the role of the courts is simply to provide a conduit for such legislation as required in (d) to bestow its gifts upon the victims, with no regard for ‘quaint’ concerns about established procedures, legal tradition, or any other pretexts for delay in providing the relief prescribed; f) that the role of the government through the court is not to be a ‘trier of fact’ but rather to be merely a referee according to the assumptions (a) through (d) above; g) that the ‘job’ of the victim is to ‘get even’, and that this is a right the fulfillment of which no court has the right to obstruct on any pretext whatsoever.

Rawlsianism? The essence of the approach is a) that certain types of ‘justice’ cannot be delayed even by democratic or constitutional principles and procedures; b) that because of the importance of the need, it is justifiable that those ‘elites’ who do see the need may dispense with ‘usual’ democratic and constitutional practices, principles, and procedures in order to meet the need; c) that in order to achieve (b) the use of the court system rather than the legislative system or any appeal to public deliberation is not only justifiable but necessary; d) that the most effective deployment of this ‘philosophy’ would be in law schools where not only future attorneys – defense or prosecutor or civil litigator – but also future judges and government appointees receive their training and education in the practice of law.

If this is what’s been going on in law schools for the past decades, then a couple of things follow.

First, it’s no surprise that the Bushist Imperium figured that the Constitution was now ‘quaint’ and that such developments opened up whole new ‘vistas’ in government power (which alas, have yielded so much government mischief and misadventure).

Second, that the spate of baddish law which now cumulatively bethumps Us has not been the result of a particularly sustained negative alignment of the planets but is rather the perfectly predictable consequence of generations of attorneys, judges, government advisers, and even legislators being trained in some form of the above ‘legal thought’.

Third, that the enhanced power of the Unitary Executive amassed by the Bushist Imperium in order to realize its own goals has not so much upset or surprised the purportedly ‘liberal’ elements of the political spectrum (as it did not upset or surprise the purportedly ‘conservative’ elements of the political spectrum). Rather, such a powerball lump of amassed authority has simply whetted the appetite of the purported ‘liberals’ to get their hands on it in order to wield it for their own purposes. So We shouldn’t expect the Democratic power-establishment to be seriously disassembling the Bushist bomb any time soon. They didn’t want to get elected in order to destroy it; they wanted to get elected in order to use it themselves.

If only a fraction of these ideas – or all of them though not fully (yet) realized – are in serious play in the syllabus of the nation’s law schools, and have been for a dozen or two dozen years, then there are an awful lot of very important public officials and officers of courts who are working on a verrrry different game-plan from what most citizens imagine and assume. It’s like the town invaded by the pods in the 1950s movie, with increasing numbers of folks being replaced by their reprogrammed alien replicas.

Boy, are We in trouble now.

But it’s pretty much what ‘the revolution’ was going for all along. Hey, they’re revolutionaries … and that’s how they roll.

WOMEN AND LAW

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is photographed in the ‘Boston Globe’. She recently visited the New England School of Law and gave what appears to be – the ‘Globe’ would never put it thus – the standard PC ‘How I Did It’ speech.

Well, good on her.

However, a few thoughts.

I’ve recently Posted on her Dissent in Gonzales v. Carhart (“Ginsburg and Carhart”, 13 Feb., 2009). As I noted there, she deploys many of the new standard illogicalities, incoherences, and too-shrewd sleights-of-mind in that Dissent.

What got me thinking today? First, the venue: the New England School of Law is not your ivy-league law school (not that of itself that proves anything). It has on its faculty a lawyer by the name of Wendy Murphy, whose opinions are consistently and vividly ‘pro-woman’ and ‘pro-victim’ (and I have nothing against ‘women’ as such or persons victimized (and who isn’t, these days?).

I have been thinking recently that We have not paid enough attention to what is being taught in law schools these days. After all, Murphy is loud, but she’s not particularly original – and she is a faculty member. And Ginsburg is certainly not a ground-breaking – let alone compelling – legal thinker. So they’re getting this stuff from somewhere.

In my Ginsburg Post I had mentioned what I’ll say here again: the terrible and not coincidental synergy between a) Second Wave feminism (especially its “ideological” variant) and b) the judicial ‘philosophy’ of the late John Rawls.

The gravamen of Second Wave legal ‘vision’ (not to say ‘thought’) seems to be this: Whatever has to be done to make it easier for ‘women’ (which by definition means making it harder for ‘men’) is ‘justice’, and neither the Constitution (contaminated by patriarchy, perhaps irretrievably) nor any long-standing justicial practices of Western justice (rules of evidence, statutes of limitations, etc.; all equally contaminated by patriarchy) can be allowed to stand in the way of the ‘revolution’.

This, as you can see, is the old “Law at War” or “Combat Justice” concept of both Soviet and Nazi jurisprudence, utterly antithetical both to Western concepts of Justice and to the very core of democracy and a democratic society. It was later deployed by the Bushist Imperium, as sooo many of the commentariat will (quite accurately) point out nowadays. BUT decades before Bush, Cheney, and the Children of Darkness picked it up, this concept had been inhaled and thoroughly metabolized by the sistern of the Second Wave.

And it was Rawls* who made a career for himself by providing – in the early 1970s – just the legal ‘cover’ that would ‘baptize’ the spawn of Stalin’s and Hitler’s legal ‘vision’ for the use over here of those who did ‘get it’ and wanted very much to share (read: impose) their vision upon everybody else (read: the lumps who ‘just didn’t get it’).

Essentially, Rawls cobbled together a legal ‘philosophy’ that in its time was all the rage: in the interests of ‘justice’ (as Rawls meant it, though he never clearly defined it) it was OK for the “elites” (read: those who agreed with him) to disregard Constitutional principles and practice in order to get that ‘justice’ going. He was especially interested in his approach being taught in law schools, where the genuine ‘elites’ (read: those who agreed with him and with each other) could train for the Bar and the Bench and then go on to put his strategy of imposition into practice in the courtrooms of the nation, and the higher the court the better.

But he was realistic. Naturally, many of the law-school grads would go on instead into a career as a ‘legislator’; they could serve the cause there by passing laws based on his views, whether such laws conformed to the Constitution and established judicial practice or not. (This was in the very early 1970s.)

Can it be a coincidence that We have seen not only the Bushist disregard for the Constitution and judicial practice and authority, but also – long before Bush – the spate of laws that for decades have posed grave Constitutional corrosions? Why Congress now passes laws that it apparently doesn’t even read (the Patriot Act was hardly the first) ?

In the photo of Ginsburg’s talk I have seen, she is framed at a classroom podium in one of those ‘arena’ classrooms you find in colleges; rising behind her are several rows of female students – and one lone male.

I see absolutely no reason why females cannot be attorneys, judges, or legislators and pols. But I most certainly do see a problem if generations of students are being trained to work in the courts or legislatures, having been trained in the legal ‘visions’ of ideological feminism and Rawlsian strategy.

Forget the general university classes and the ‘tenured radicals’ and Theory and deconstruction and all of that. I think the Law Schools have been the key to the corrosion of the Constitution for quite some time. What are they teaching in there? What do its graduates believe?

As I have also said, I do not agree that judicial candidates should be interrogated as to how they would vote on this or that particular type of case. If the candidate is intelligent, competent in Law, and upright, then confirm him or her, and come what may. That’s how the system is designed to work.

But if a candidate is actually ‘trained in’ and ‘committed to’ a philosophy whereby ‘elites’ impose their vision on the country, regardless of what the Constitution or the common weal indicate, then I think such a person is per se and prima facie and in radice and ab initio unqualified to hold judicial office in the American system. And, hell, I’d advise voters to ask their legislative candidates too, because the same point applies to the Congressional as to the Judicial.

We can see where the Executive recently decided – no doubt having watched the lethal whackery of the previous few decades – that the Constitution was ‘quaint’ and that legal restrictions, even the most stringent and clear, were ‘fungible’ and could be ignored with impunity ‘in a good cause’.

The only difference between Left and Right now lies in the definition of just what constitutes that ‘good’ that automatically justifies overriding the Constitution and democratic process and politics.

We are in a frakking heap o’ trouble.

NOTES

*The book to read is David Lewis Schaefer’s “Illiberal Justice: John Rawls and the American Political Tradition”, Columbia (MO), University of Missouri Press, 2007. It should be noted that Professor Schaefer had detected the lethal dangers to the American political tradition hidden in Rawls’s ‘philosophy’ as early as the late 1970s and published on it. This book is an expansion prompted by the extent –ominously ‘bipartisan’ – of the corrosion so brutally evident by the mid-2000s.

LITTLE THINGS

I was in one of my favorite bookstores the other day. There was a rack with really really inexpensive books – and you can never tell what you might find.

I found a copy of a book from October, 1990. It seems like another world, thinking back on that time. The Berlin Wall down, Communism dissolving before Our eyes. A new chapter of the world’s torturous climb into brighter uplands ready to be inscribed as a great darkness began to break in its very core.

Not that I’m a nostalgic type. There has never been a golden time, a perfect time. Still, there was a moment when Titanic was seaworthy – for all her structural faults and the sins and failures of those who sailed in her – and then there was a moment when Titanic was most certainly no longer seaworthy. History didn’t stop, nor in a way did Titanic’s own history … but it would change; a certain phase, of her time ‘in the light’ as it were, was over, never to be recovered.

Not that the lives of nations work quite as clearly and decisively, as simply and as quickly, as the lives of an individual machine, even one as large as an ‘unsinkable’ ocean liner. There are many ‘waves’ in human history: some of them are short, sharp, like high-frequency radio waves, quick and almost evanescent; even more so the very-high and ultra-high frequency waves. But then there are low-frequency waves, long, undulating, somewhat slower waves, but powerful in their quiet way, coursing along, unstoppable, implacable in their way.

I took to this book not so much to master its particular thoughts, specific to its time and perhaps – in its time – bearing the appearances of ‘the right thing’ that ‘everybody knows’. Instead, I was looking to see what much lower-frequency information it might yield, revealing a relationship or many relationships to larger and deeper and more hidden waves, coursing along through the decades, bearing Us and the world along though We – excited by the VHF and UHF agitations of the time – would miss.

And in missing them, fail to grasp what consequences they would bear, consequences that were not inevitable, but that had to be dealt with by humans lest they exercise an influence and a matrix of consequences that would take from humans the power to best Shape their history.

It doesn’t often end well, when humans lose – or yield – the power to Shape their affairs.

The book is Mary Catherine Bateson’s “Composing a Life”. A pleasant work, very much of its time. A compilation of anecdotes about and reflections upon the lives of five women selected by the author, whose experiences best exemplify – to her – the ‘new’ wisdom of the age.

Harmless enough, and not without its useful insights. No doubt it was much lauded and read by many on the ‘cutting edge’ of that era: academics whose authority and speculations were amplified by a government eager to please what it considered to be a ‘key’ demographic and a media eager no longer to ‘report’ but rather to ‘be players’ in History.

Several points that it made caught my attention. The page-numbers I give are from the Plume edition of October, 1990.

“This book is about life as an improvisatory art” (p.3) ‘Improvisation’ was big back then; it was a theme that would ‘create space’ by prying apart the sense of solidity and established patterns. It’s a great gambit for those who teach and those who do therapy: loosening up the way a student or patient conceives of ‘the world’ and of events, in order to make room for new insight and new growth. Classrooms and counseling offices are its best locus.

Whether it would be wise to make it a principle of governance is another question. Whether it would be wise for any government to ‘valorize’ it as the overarching national approach to law and policy – also another question.

Whether it would be wise to embrace numerous various ‘improvisations’ throughout the height and length and depth and breadth of a nation’s and a people’s life and affairs – also another question.

What consequences might follow from such wide and deep and sustained ‘improvisation’ – also another question.

Questions never really asked or considered.

But the book is unfazed. In a stunning ‘kitchen’ metaphor, the author opines that her life resembled – as she saw it – a ‘frantic’ effort to throw a meal together for unexpected guests, from whatever “conflicting” ingredients might be in the kitchen, figuring that at the last minute it would all come together, “hoping to be rescued by serendipity” (p.3).

But not to worry. The ‘improvised’ meal is often better than any ‘planned’ meal, “rich with the possibility of delicious surprise”(p.4). So it’s actually better not to plan or to think ahead, or to limit your possibilities to some plan, even your own – the entire concept of ‘planning’ is apparently the problem; it’s not liberating, it’s constricting.

But, echoing the brightest summer afternoons of the Sixties, it goes further than that: “Improvisation can be either a last resort or an established way of evoking creativity”. So ‘planning’ actually blocks that great shining damp-dream of both the Flower Children and their more ascetic, fiercely focused ‘radical’ and ‘revolutionary’ peers: “creativity”. Wheeeeeee.

So We would enter into the most gravid and hopeful period of the world’s history in all of the sorry, blood-soaked 20th century, and for some centuries before that, dedicated to the proposition that ‘planning’ was a baaad thing. And, I wonder, if ‘planning’ is bad, what of ‘thinking’, what of reasoning?

No matter. As Mao burbled with that ominous whale-shark smile of his back in those same Sixties: ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom!’ Kitchens, flowers, national policy foreign and domestic, laws, wars, birth, life, death – it’s all the same thing. After all, We were Number One, now more than ever.

And when will We decide to retire that ghastly word “rich”, freighted now with the burden of so much monstrous fecklessness?

“When the choices and rhythms of life change, as they have in our time …” (p.4). Well, that’s being a tad disingenuous. Things weren’t ‘changing’, not naturally, not in the way large matters ‘change’ in a democratic politics. Rather, such ‘change’ was being enacted, here, there, and everywhere in the country, imposed by legislators and pols who figured that no matter how whacky things might sound when they were ‘demanded’, everything would turn out OK; not necessarily because the demands made any sense in the long term, but simply because there was no longer anybody on the planet big enough to stop Us and whatever it was that We decided to do. Bush didn’t think it all up when he came along a decade later. And the cash was flowing, bubbling up – as it were – from the ground or out of thin air, as it had for Jed Clampett. It was Beverly Hills for everybody now. The bankers were Our friends, like the Clampetts’ obsequious Mr. Drysdale. Life was sweet, and We were ‘phat’, living large.

“Assumptions about careers are not unlike those about marriage; the real success stories are supposed to be permanent and monogamous” (p.7). So the stable marriage, like the stable career, was just a misconception, an ‘oppressive’ fantasy that blocked ‘creativity’. Weirdly, this assumption blended in perfectly with the outsourcing of ‘oppressive’ jobs. Marriage and the economy were both to be recast; marriage, actually, almost to be cast aside. Who woulda’ thunk that the economy would actually go away along with marriage?

Those assumptions, indeed, “have not been valid for many of history’s most creative people” (p.7). So the entire citizenry would be cast loose from their moorings (and their foundations) on the assumption that there were a lot of the most ‘creative’ people who needed their space. Wheeeeeee, again.

“Goals too clearly defined can become blinkers” (p.7). So don’t be so ‘goal-oriented’. Simon and Garfunkel’s advice (quite possibly sarcastic) to ‘just get yourself free’ was going to become national policy. There are a hundred ways to leave your loved one … those hundred flowers would bloom! Or at least the most ‘creative’ ones would.

“It is time now to explore the potential of interrupted and conflicted lives, where energies are not narrowly focused or permanently pointed toward a single ambition” (p.9). Focusing a life and disciplining one’s energies toward a single goal … nah. Imagine how children, those wild, vital vines, would turn out without a Trellis, without even any help in shaping energies. What would such a ‘self’ be like? What would it become? What would millions of such young lives become as they ‘grew’?

What would a government be like that embraced such a ‘philosophy’ whole-hog? What would it do?

Such lives “are not without commitment but rather lives in which commitments are continually refocused and redefined” (p.9). But the entire concept of ‘commitment’ requires that one ‘stick to’ it; that one allows one’s life and its possibilities to be shaped, confined in a way, by the commitment that was made.

To continuously ‘redefine’ commitment is to have no commitment at all, to reduce the solidities of existence to fluid, to water – water for which there is no container, water that slips through the fingers, of a person, of a people, of a nation.

“Fluidity and discontinuity are central to the reality in which we live” (p.13). Nothing ‘solid’? No ‘solid ground’? And We truly are on Noah’s Ark now – surrounded by the flood. But in the 1990 ‘vision’ – or ‘dream’ – everything would remain without substance, because substance and nature and even Nature itself, ‘confined’ and did not ‘liberate’;’ oppressed’ and did not empower.

But We are worse off than Noah: not only are We adrift upon the formless flood, but We are not supposed to be looking for any ‘solid ground’ – no need to send out the dove and hope some sort of olive branch will come back to Us as a promise, or even an indicator, of solid ground upon which to continue Our lives. It’s all water – and that’s a good thing. Yah.

“Continuity is the exception in twentieth-century America” (p.14). So, the Constitution is merely a ‘continuity’, and perhaps a ‘commitment’ to be ‘redefined’. What does this bode for the Republic? For a democratic politics anchored in a Framing vision and structure and process of how Our affairs might be conducted? What does this bode for human lives that grow without any solid Shape? What happens to water that is not in some way ‘contained’?

And of course, ‘continuity’ was the exception because it was being forcefully removed, evicted. It was not any ‘natural’ or ‘historical’ inevitability that was causing such a dubious and potentially lethal change – it was national policy. The classroom, the therapy room, the coffee klatsch, the halls of legislatures … just rooms to be remodeled – with no thought for what walls were decorative and expendable, and which walls were carrying-walls, that held the whole building up.

“Our lives are longer and more full of possibilities than ever before” (p.15). Ah, 1990! How water is supposed to move toward possibility, how fluidity can hold any energy together that can then achieve a chosen possibility – that question was not considered. But then, ‘achievement’ itself was no longer a goal. It was, actually, just ‘something’ that you assumed, like financial primacy and sufficiency; it would always be there so you didn’t have to give it any thought, let alone darken your optimism and baffle your creativity with serious and even skeptical analysis.

The infinite plasticity of life and history … wheeeeeee! The ‘thought’ of the 1990s was just so cheerible, to use Dickens’s superb neologism. Let the hundred revolutions bloom – but this would be a cheerible blooming, not the dark and bloody business of prior revolutions.

Revolution was not the danger; ‘patriarchy’ and its lack of creativity were the problem.

“We are engaged in a day-to-day process of self-invention – not discovery … “ (p.28). After all, there is nothing ‘inside’ of a human being to ‘discover’; it’s all ‘invention’. No human nature, no preconceptions that will ‘oppress’. How do you ground ‘rights’ for individuals if there is no human nature? Or are ‘rights’ just something commonly agreed-upon – or, more probably, granted by the state? But if rights are merely commonly-agreed-upon, what happens to 'rights' when some of the citizens change their mind? And if rights are merely ‘gifts’ or ‘grants’ made by the state at its whim, then on what grounds does the Republic stand? The government is no longer the servant of The People, but just the citizenry’s ‘Godfather’ (or –mother). And what happens then?

“Lives are in flux” and “it is a temptation to interpret them as pilgrimages to some fixed goal”(p.29). And such a temptation is baaad, although there is no ‘sin’. No wonder Christianity is under attack: the whole concept of an ordered life, of a life toward a goal, has been Flattened and even rendered as a fool’s errand. The long progress of Jewish and Christian thought and experience, of one’s own life and the lives of all others as a journey toward a larger Goal, a Goal beyond the appearances and darkling fluxes of this world, are mere fantasies, and in the service of oppression to boot.

But “there is no way of knowing which fragments of the past will prove to be relevant to” a continuously re-imagined future (p.29). Fragments like … the Constitution? Is there some connection between this kind of ‘thought’ and the increasing un-Constitutional and even anti-Constitutional developments We have been seeing? What solid grounds can the Constitution provide if one can ‘pick and choose’, adopt and then toss away? What solid grounds are there for an individual to Shape a self and conduct a life in the face of history’s powerful forces? What happens to an individual then?

But you are supposed to “forget those events that proved to have no meaning within the narrative” (p.30). Meaning ‘your’ narrative, the one you personally have ‘chosen’ for yourself. It’s a good thing, in therapy with an individual patient, to re-instill some sense of personal meaning and purpose. But it’s something else altogether to transfer that good therapeutic gambit to national policy, while simultaneously erasing any influences or authority beyond the individual which need to be factored in as the individual comes to shape and embrace that vitalizing sense of meaning and purpose. A human being ‘empowered’ simply by being ‘freed’ from any ‘outside’ references whatsoever is a human being not empowered, but doomed to solipsism and a grossly inaccurate, incomplete comprehension of the nature of this life and of the forces that not only acting upon him or her, but that might be available as support. A therapist who sends out a patient in such a condition and considers it a good day’s work is guilty of a profound ignorance and malpractice.

The author gets into the ‘story’ of a black woman, formerly a ‘revolutionary’ and now suddenly a college president, who starts to become “aware” (not that she starts to ‘think’) that “being female can be just as much of a disadvantage as being black” (p.44). Now on a political strategy level, there is indeed truth to this: to be able to connect the age-long oppressive denial of civil-rights to blacks in America with the large female demographic would create a political super-demographic of intense potential. A feminist Advocacy that could ‘speak for all women’ would be the very entity whose perceived authority could focus such possibilities like a laser-weapon from outer space upon the legislative halls and process.

True enough indeed.

But it’s another thing altogether to conceptually link with accuracy the concerns of ‘women’ – or at least as We know them through the Advocacy of the Second Wave of Feminism – with the very solidly established historical experiences of American blacks over the course of four centuries in the New World. And it’s interesting to recall that the initial analogical linkage – by Betty Friedan in 1965 – was to the Jewish death-camp inmates of the Holocaust (home-and-marriage-and-family-as-a-woman’s-Dachau), not to the civil-rights struggles of American blacks; there’s a certain flavor of ‘shopping around’ in all of this.

It also leads to the confusion of the nature of ‘race’ and ‘gender’.

We recall that the Royal Navy made a profound conceptual mistake a hundred years ago when it called it’s new class of heavily-gunned but lightly-armored warships “battle-cruisers”. The term sounded too much like “battleships”, which were heavily-gunned and heavily-armored. And consequently, the ‘battle-cruisers’ were considered capable of slugging it out with actual enemy ‘battleships’ – the awful result, as seen in those terrible few hours at Jutland, was that under fire the battle-cruisers suddenly started blowing up and going down instantly with all their thousands of sailors when the enemy’s battle-ship shells easily penetrated their armor. This was not a ‘tragedy’ – something awful but unforeseeable that ‘just sorta happened’; this was the direct result of a monstrous professional failure to clarify the terms and concepts involved: a cruiser, no matter how dolled-up, is not a battleship and is not the equal of a battleship in combat.

‘Race’ is not quite the same type of animal as ‘gender’. While the two are each ‘concepts’ they are not at all the same kind of entity – they do not share the same root causes, so they are not susceptible to the same strategies of comprehension and change. ‘Congestive heart disease’ and ‘cancer’ are both diseases; but the effective treatment for the one is not an effective treatment for the other. And for a physician to treat a patient suffering from congestive heart disease with the same treatment prescribed for a patient suffering from cancer – just because congestive-heart and cancer are both ‘diseases’ … constitutes profound malpractice.

But it is surely politically convenient to lump them together. And it is almost diabolically shrewd to foster the illusion that they are the essentially the same type of entity. Such almost-willful category mistakes have led Us into disaster in the ‘war’ on ‘terrorism’, and such a decades-old incompetence in distinguishing one thing from another enabled Us to accept without demur that ‘invasion’ and ‘occupation’ constitute ‘liberation’ and that there couldn’t possibly be any negative consequence from doing whatever it was that We wanted to do. But such monstrous incompetence did not start with Bush and his era. Category mistakes can be lethal: whether it is mis-classifying a fungus found in the forest as ‘edible’ when it is actually poisonous, or misclassifying the nature of a challenge on a national or international level.

I would add here that there is a huge difference between a ‘story’ or ‘narrative’ and a Narrative. A Narrative – I would say – is an overarching vision of one’s life, but also of one’s place in the scheme of things; its roots are beyond this dimension, this ‘world’, and provide deep grounds for that belief that is utterly essential for a human being, or group of human beings, to conduct themselves in the ‘boombuzz’, dark and bright, of history. Narrative is low-frequency; story is very-high or ultra-high frequency.

A ‘story’ is of much shorter range and depth; it is a way of conceiving a particular group of experiences one encounters in one’s daily ‘history’; it is limited to this-world and the particular ‘time’ during which it is conceived.

The higher frequencies aren’t so good for carrying over long distances of space … or Time.

The author quotes approvingly this woman’s conclusion that, since concepts of ‘gender’ are even more deeply embedded in society than those of ‘race’, extending thus even to the home-setting where children are first raised, then “unless the State reaches into that household, it’s just a lot harder to deal with all that stuff” (p.46). And here, I would say, is a monstrously ominous indicator of the type of threat to Constitutional society as well as a democratic politics – a threat whose consequences during the past 20 years have increased exponentially. When government ‘reaches into’ the very hearths of the citizenry, then the Framers’ vision of how government would be bound by The People is completely undermined. In their urge to achieve their goals (such as they are) or at least to make such achievement less ‘hard’ and more ‘easy’, the ideologists of the Second Wave invited the vampire of the government in through the front door.

“The need to sustain human growth should be a concern for the entire society, even more fundamental than sustaining productivity” (p.55). Well, here We are, in the Year of Grace Two Thousand and Nine, and ‘productivity’ has indeed disappeared. It’s perfectly true as an isolated concept – what the author says. But isolated concepts on blackboards, isolated for the purpose of understanding them, are not what exist in actual human life and affairs. A nation that makes as its national policy a focus on ‘human growth’ – without actually defining that nebulous though attractive and desirable concept – is asking for trouble; a nation that then actively outsources its base productivity capacity is digging its own grave; a nation that then erects such a dismissal of ‘productivity’ into a positive good and a sustained and actively pursued national policy, is strangling itself while it stands on the edge of the grave it has been digging.

And after her experiences living in Iran under the Shah and immediately following the Khomeini revolution, the author decides that the moral conviction and urgency of both those who wanted to get rid of the Shah’s government because it was ‘bad’ and those who supported Khomeini’s fundamentalist revolution because it would be ‘good’ … the moral conviction and urgency of both groups were fatuous. Thus, she concludes, “moral ambiguity can be a source of strength”(p.190).
Oy.

This is akin to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Having watched the ‘conviction’ of both Southerners and Northerners result in the awful bloodbath of the Civil War, in which he fought as a young man and was repeatedly wounded, Holmes decided that ‘absolutes’ were nothing but invitations to horror. He came to a particular version of American philosophical ‘pragmatism’: that ‘absolutes’ are to be avoided (others would go further and say that Absolutes do not exist).

But with no ‘ground’ solid enough to bear the weight of human aspirations and suffering; with no ground solid enough to justify the self-sacrifice and commitment that enables human beings to sustain their course in the face of evil – their own as well as others’; with no such ground let alone any ‘support’, then human beings become un-rooted, rootless, un-grounded, like a Ferris wheel spinning madly but without any struts to steady it and hold it in place. Blood and catastrophe will be the only result.

So what am I saying here?

I am not saying that Bateson was the ‘mastermind’ of anything. I am not saying that Bateson was trying to create a catastrophe. It does not matter whether she had repudiated or changed her ideas since the book was written.

There was no ‘conspiracy’. But there was a ‘synergy’. Politicians who were desperate to raise up and then placate new voting blocs that could be reliably counted upon; persons who wanted change but were too impatient or dismissive (whether they knew it or not) of the democratic process and even of democracy itself; intellectuals who were intoxicated by being ‘doers’ or by being celebrities or both; a media that was intoxicated more with making ‘history’ than reporting substantively on the news.

Any one of these elements could create an imbalance in democratic process; but the process has built-in capabilities precisely to handle such imbalance, like the baffles in a tanker truck that prevent ‘waves’ from running the whole length of the cargo, capable of overturning the truck. But when all of the baffles failed, then the lethal wave-action dynamic could increase beyond safe limits.

Impatient advocates occurr naturally in a democracy, but ideally the ‘excessive’ or ‘unrealistic’ nature of either the content or the extent or the implementation-speed of their demands will result in their modifying their agenda or in their program being modified for them. But advocates who are actually committed (whether they acknowledge or even realize it) to revolutionary process as opposed to democratic process are literally going to undermine the system.

Public Intellectuals would presumably be interested in truth and in critical and accurate analysis of large programs. But ‘celebrity’ or ‘advocacy’ intellectuals are not interested in the truth or accuracy, but rather in the success of the agenda to which they have hitched their own professional star or upon which they have chosen to bestow the support of their ‘advocacy’.

Media would also presumably be interested in providing accurate and comprehensive reporting; But a media seeking to satisfy this or that demographic among its ‘consumers’ would tailor what it ‘reports’ to what it thinks those ‘consumers’ want in order to keep its ‘numbers’ up.

Legislators, of course, would be the lynchpin. Sworn to uphold the democratic process and responsible for carefully weighing just how much and what kind of change would be in the common interest at any point, the legislators would presumably speak for the interests of the common weal. They would first conduct their own careful and thorough analysis so that they would be able to assess the benefits and costs – and even the probability of dangerous outcomes – that would be involved. But a political party so fearful of its continuity and power that it would make its own political survival a more important objective than the common weal or even the integrity of the democratic process …. Such a failure as that would almost inevitably create lethal imbalances if sustained over the course of time. Like, say, the Biblical past forty years.

I am looking at ‘ideas’, ‘innocent’ in themselves, if not actually self-evident in their accuracy and wisdom, that in their time almost twenty years ago were welcomed into the national consciousness, and into national political practice. And indeed were almost imposed upon the national consciousness, as the ‘high’ purposes of ‘liberation’ and ‘civil rights’ became – accurately or otherwise – attached to them, which enabled the imposition of a Political Correctness that did not permit the careful and full analysis of those ideas.

But this does not take Bateson off the hook. The potential dangers of the ideas I have quoted were there for anybody to see even in 1990.

Nor does it take the intellectuals or the media or the pols off the hook.

Individually open to much doubt and certainly capable of leading to some very undesirable consequences, these ideas were yet raised up as ‘cutting edge’ insight, as if their implementation would lead to nothing but ‘good’. Individually dubious although hardly empty of worth, yet when taken altogether and acting in concert they exerted a fateful pressure on Us as individuals and as a people, and upon us as The People, and upon Our republic.

It may seem hard to imagine that a bunch of not-so-bad thoughts, and practices that in classrooms or therapy offices would have been most fruitful to pursue carefully, could create such baneful forces when ‘merely’ transferred into policy and law.

And all within the space of less than twenty years. Persons who were even young adults in 1990 can perhaps entertain in their mind’s eye that year, and each of the succeeding years, and now.

And ask themselves: Did I really let this stuff get by me?

This is an excellent question to ask.

But the hour is late. And huge – possibly lethal – damage has been done.

This is not a call to ‘turn back the clock’. This is a call to look much more closely and carefully at what has been done, what has happened as a result of what has been done, and consider what must be done now to repair if not altogether restore, the great Gift that is the Narrative of this country.