Hildegarde

Okay, let’s cause even more trouble, and try to be a little more articulate about what I was trying to say yesterday.

First, an aside–I’m with Mique, but  I go farther, in my distrust of psychologists as experts.  There are branches of psychology–brain science studies, genetic mapping–that have call to claim status as a science, but I don’t think ordinary clinical psychology does. 

Clinical psychology seems to me to assume its conclusions far too often–to begin with “theories” of human nature based on anything but actual human nature, and then to reinterpret whatever it sees so that it fits those theories. 

And they’re notoriously bad at predicting anybody’s future behavior.  One of the things never mentioned about the priest “pedophilia” scandal is that what the Catholic Church did was to take the advice of the best psychological experts of the time, who tended to insist that victims (as young as six!) were conplicit and that offenders could be easily cured with anyting from “counseling” to aversion therapy.

And I’m not necessarily opposed to sex offender registries if they’re restricted to actual child rapists, or rapists.  I do think it might make more sense for us to simply keep the guys in jail longer.  If we want them away from the general public, they’re more likely to be contained there than in a house on the next block that everybody knows belongs to a “sex offender.”  This guy in Ohio managed to live fifteen ears and rack up at least ten kills over the course of fifteen years while on the registry the whole time.

The real issue here is the way we look at sex–all sex, not just the bad sex, but all of it.  Sex is the last bastion of the romantic fallacy for most of us.  You remember the romantic fallacy.  It’s the idea that anything that’s natural must be good.

I remember sittin in a classroom listening to this idea for the very first time and thinking about hurricanes.   It seemed obvious to me even then that ten seconds worth of thought would be all it took to disprove th is kind of nonsense.  Hurricanes are natural.  Tsunamis are natural.  The E. Coli virus is natural.

With sex, though, we’ve gone farther than to say that anything that’s natural is good.  We’ve managed to become so essentialist that we’ve begun to equate sex and identity.  Sexuality, we say, is the most important thing about us.  We have to be able to be “who we are” and that means we have to be able to be open about our “sexual orientation.”

And that gets us into some problems.

The first is that pedophilia is in all likelihood a sexual orientation.  In other words, I think the guys who say they have “always been this way” are probably telling the truth. 

And let me be clear here–by pedophilia I mean the drive to have sex with PRE-pubescent children.  True pedophiles are blessedly rare, as far as we can tell, but that doesn’t make what they feel “unnatural.” 

Nor can we easily blame the phenomenon on a “mental illness” caused by having been abused oneself in childhood.  Most of the abusers we catch at least claim to have been abused in childhood, but not all of them do–and what is more important, most children known to have been abused in childhood do not grow up to be abusers themselves.  There’s no verifiable cause and effect relationship here. 

Which means that the very first thing we have to do is to accept the fact that some things are both natural and unquestionably, irrevocably wrong.

The way we get around this problem is to invest the wrongness of a sexual act in the consent of the parties to it.  But although this covers true pedohilia, it doesn’t cover the drive to have sex with adolescents nearly as well.

The reason it doesn’t is that an attraction to adolescents is not only natural, it’s got the driving force of one hundred thousand years of human evolution behind it.  Speaking strictly from a biological standpoint, the optimum age for women to have children is between the mid-teens and the early twenties.

We try to get around this by saying that the power differential between old and young is too great, or by  saying that somebody who is fifteen cannot really consent to sex.   But we’re conflicted about both these claims, and everything in the culture makes that conflict–and the resulting ambiguity–clear.

Take, for instance, the standard works of fiction used in high school sex ed classes, and some literature classes, dealing with homosexuality.  A remarkable percentage of them, and an even larger percentage of films, depict the relationship between an adolescent and an older man, as if this were the standard history of discovering a gay sexual orientation.

It’s possible to argue that that is the standard history of discovering a heterosexual sexual orientation, at least throughout most of the history of human beings on this planet. 

And we acknowledge the centrality of female adolescent ssexuality and its attraction for older men in virtually everything we do.  Lots of people, especially feminists, complain that the image of women in advertisements and entertainment is false and unrealistic–but it isn’t.  That “look,” the slim thighs and narrow hips along with large breasts, is in fact what girls look like when they first hit puberty. 

What’s more, it’s not entirely clear that a sixteen or seventeen year old girl can’t meaningfully consent to sex with a thirty year old.   It would depend on the girl, of course, but n oting magic happens when she turns eighteen.

The reasons we want to prohibit these relationships has nothing to do with consent, or with harm as it’s usually understood, but because we want our girls to stay in school, get educations and become lawyers, which is harder to do if they’re getting married straight out of high school to the local doctor, or even if they’re just shacking up with him. 

What all this means is this–we cannot get the kind of sexual ethic we want by relying on the “natural” and “consent” foundations which is all we’ve given it.  Assuming the centrality of sexual orientation to identity is a disaster.

When pedophiles say they “can’t help it,” are they telling the truth?  Probably not.  Most of us can in fact “help” our sexual behavior.  Men and women have committed themselves to chastity for lifetimes, in the face of strong sex drives, too. 

But we live in a world in which the ability to control sexual behavior is not only denied, it’s largely denigrated.  Not only can’t we control ourselves, we are told, but we’re being hateful and intolerant if we expect anybody to control themselves.

Except we don’t say anybody.  We say teenagers–teenagers hae sex, what else do you expect them to do?  And we say gay people–it’s natural to them, so they should be able to express themselves sexually just the way heterosexuals do.

Now, you’re talking to somebody who sees nothing wrong with homosexuality, and who supports gay mariage.  But I don’t do it because homosexuality is “natural” (it is, but so is pedophilia, bestiality, and all the rest of it).  Nor do I do it because life isn’t worth living if you can’t “be true to yourself” when it comes to sex.

If these are the only bases on which we can approve or disapprove sexual behavior, then we will in the end have no grounds for forbidding the things we don’t want. 

If we do want to forbid those things, then we have to start by acknowledging that some of the things that are natural to us should not be done anyway, and that a climate in which some knds of sex are forbidden even though they’re both natural and consensual, is an environment in which we will have fewer actual active sexual predators.

The woman–and, certainly, the very pretty woman–Jem was thinking of is Debra Lafave, and it’s odd that she should have brought it up, because it’s part of a phenomenon that I find a little uncomfortable.

First, I will say I see nothing wrong with the judge’s decision.  As far as I can tell by Googling it, Lafave had a sexual relationship with a fourteen year old male student, which is certainly against the law–but she doesn’t seem to have shown the sort of predatory behavior the sex offender laws were designed to police.  She hasn’t been caught fondling six year olds or raping fourth graders.  She doesn’t hang around on chat rooms looking for underaged naifs to jump on. 

There are certainly such people out there, and I think most people think that it is such people who are required to appear on the sex offender registry.

The fact is, however, that that registry now has lots of names of people who have exhibited nothing like the predatory behavior the lists were designed to inhibit, or tha tthe public (and the SCOTUS) was allowed to think was the basis of the end run these laws have taken around a number of Constitutional guarantees.  A number of states, for instance, require any person arrested for a sex offense–even if ultimately acquitted–to appear on the state registry.  SCOTUS says that this is okay, although it would be unConstitutional for any other crime, because “we have to protect the children.”

Okay, don’t get me started on Sandra Day O’Connor.

But here’s the thing–if you’re an eighteen year old high school senior who has sex with your fifteen year old sophomore girlfriend and her parents find out and get nasty–well, you’re guilty of statutory rape and if you’re convicted (and lots of people have been), then you go on a sex offender registry for life.  This is, I feel sure, not the kind of thing the public thought it was supporting when it got behind the registry and the sex offender laws.

I’m sure it also wasn’t the intent of those passing, and approving, of  child pornography laws to prosecute thirteen year old girls for taking pictures of themselves nude and sending them to all their friends, and then prosecuting the friends for receiving the pictures even though they didn’t know they were about to get them, and then put the whole crew on the sex offender registry for life. 

It seems to me that what we have done with sex offenders is to find an excuse for relocating moral controls over sexual behavior to the legal realm.  Our private culture may insist that anything goes.  A thousand psychologists may declare that sexual guilt is entirely a bad thing.  It doesn’t matter, because none of that applies when we’re dealing with children.

Then, of course, we redefine the word “children.”  Ask anybody you know about the “priest pedaphilia” scandal, and they’ll tell you that it was about priests raping little boys–six and eight year olds.

But in fact, aside from one really high profile case (concerning a very prolific priest), almost all the abuse allegations were against priests who approached teen-agers.

And no, I’m not saying that this is allowable, because it isn’t.  I am saying it’s not about “children.” 

Our sex offender laws treat sexuality with more inherent distaste than a Victorian chaperone, lumping together real crimes with minor malfeasance and things that shouldn’t be crimes at all.  What’s more, they treat all “sex offenders” as equal, as if that eighteen year old kid is just as much a danger to the public as a John Wayne Gacy.

It seems to me that we would do better if we accepted the fact that most of us do not, in fact, think it’s okay for sex to be as open, available and outside the realm of judgment as it is–that would, at least, be the truth.  If we think teen-agers should not be having sex, then maybe we need to send a culture-wide message–not just in laws and sex ed classes, but in movies and music and television–that it’s unacceptable, period.

Or–bigger shock–maybe those of us who have reached the age of consensual adulthood–you have no idea how long it took me to figure out the grammar for that prepositional phrase–anyway, maybe adults need to accept that there is only one way to really protect children from sexual predators, and that is to voluntarily accept some restrictions on their own sexual behavior.

I don’t know enough about the Debra Lafave case to have any kind of real take on what happened between her and the student, besides the sex.  And no, when you’re dealing with an adolescent, the actual case often isn’t as simple as it may seem.  She may have been a predatory bitch.  On the other hand, Mary Kay Latourneau is now married to the kid she went to jail for having sex with.

Okay, grammar is not my strong suit today.

I’m also very aware, at this moment, of a case in Ohio where a known sex offender–the real kind, guilty of rape against children–managed to kidnap, rape and murder six more and bury the bodies in his home in spite of his place on the registry.  And the reports of his neighbors did absolutely squat in getting him investigated.

Part of the reason for that, I am sure, is that the registry is now so full of people who have committed so many different levels of offense–including (think of the senior and his sophomore girlfriend) things that weren’t offenses twenty years ago–that the police get complacent.  Joe may be on the sex offender registry, but, geez, lots of people are, and they didn’t do anything much–no need to jump through hoops just because the neighbors are complaining.

At some point, I think we’re going to need to decide what it is we really want to do about sex–about its appearance in the popular culture, about our own behavior and that of the other adults around us–and not just about what happens to children. 

If we don’t do that, we can pass all the laws we want, and they won’t do any good.

If we do do that, maybe we can go back to a common-sense approach to all these incidents.

I’ve been thinking, since yesterday, about the different kinds of stupid people in the world, and I think that part of the problem is that we use the word “stupid” to mean two nt necessarily related things.

Certainly there is “stupid” as in “has no talent at learing things,” to turn the definition of “intelligence” upside down.  And the things we’re talking about in that definition are largely intellectual–math, history, the meaning of the essay “A Modest Solution.”

But even most of the people who have difficulty with that kind of thing know better than to behave like your average stupid criminal.  Take just one small issue: video surveillance cameras.

For years, I thought the security cameras were a little silly.  I mean, for God’s sake, they were right out there in the open.  Anybody with any sense would see them and disable them before they got started, or remember to wear ski masks or something so that they were of minimal usefulness.

The reality?  Not only does the average guy looking to rob the local bank ATM not disable the cameras, he doesn’t even seem to know they’re there.  He just hauls himself in with his face fully visible, goes at the ATM machine with precision burglar’s tools like a hammer and chisel, and then finds out that it’s pretty hard to pull one of these things out of the wall, and they’re heavy. 

Of course, the guys with the hammer and chisel are smarter than the guys who sho up with no idea at all how they’re going to get the machine out of the wall at all, or who decide to enter the lobby where the machine is by backing their pick-up truck right through the plate glass wall, putting themselves in the perfect position to get their license plate clearly recorded on that video camera they’re not paying any attention to.

But the guys out to rob the ATM are smarter than the ones robbing the local convenience store, because the ATM is at least likely to contain serious money.   Walking into the Quik-Mart with a baseball bat and demanding everything in the cash register usually nets about thirty dollars, if it nets anything at all.  And then there are those security cameras again.

You don’t have to spend you time watching World’s Dumbest Criminals to realize that the vast majority of crimes seem to be committed by people who would have a hard timne following an episode of Scooby-Doo–and that’s just as true of the violent, nasty ones.  Your average rapist-murderer is a man of opportunity and no self-control, not Dr. Moriarity.

In fact, nobody is Dr. Moriarity.  Even in situations that seem, on the surface, to be ripe for attracting intelligent criminals don’t.  Take Prohibition-era liquor and modern-day drugs.  You’ve got to have at least some intelligence to put together an operation like that.  It is, at base, a business. Even the low-level dealer on the street has to be able to figure profit and loss.

What do you get?  Idiots who sell everything from crack cocaine to knock-off AK-47s to the first undercover cop who shows up, and fearless entrepreneurs who blow up entire trailer parks trying to cook crystal meth in efficiency kitchens.

While so high themselves, they have a hard time finding the toilet without falling over.

It’s not just that your average classical murder mystery couldn’t be written from material like this.  It wouldn’t make a decent plot for a noir police procedural.   Ed McBain was the only person I ever read who tried to put real crime into police procedurals, and even he had to come up with one “smart” crime per book in order to have a book. 

The kind of crime I like to write about–and the kind of crime I like to read about–is far less interesting in the real world than we make it in fiction.  The wife who murders her husband for the insurance money, in real life, almost always takes out six insurance policies on him in the month or so before the crime.  Then she hires a hit man by putting an ad for one in the local classified.

I’m not making that one up.  That one actually happened.  Of course, the “hit man” who showed up was an undercover cop.  Who else would it be?

Maybe the key to all this comes with the motivation.  I never really did understand Moriarity’s motivation.  He seemed to be evil in order to be evil, without any clear reason for eing so. 

Most criminals in real life seem to be interested in getting some money as fast as they can get it, or acting out some inner drama of anger they don’t understand themselves, and thought would be mostly a hindrance to any of that.

But it gets a little depressing.

Consider my favorite Dumb Amateur Criminal of the Week:  early this past week, a 66 year old Deputy Attorney General in the state of  South Caroline was caught with an eighteen year old prostitue in a cemetary.  The arresting officer searched the car and found a big bag of sex toys, which clinched it.  Prostitute, sex toys–reasonable cause to think that something illegal was about to happen.

The  Deputy  AG protested vigorously.  That bag of sex toys was proof of nothing at all.  He always carried that bag of sex toys with him.  You know. “Just in case.”

I have to go listen to  Bach before my head explodes.

Well, nights really.

Greg and I like to watch political opinion shows, and at eight at night, right before I go to be, we watch either Keith Olbermann or Bill O’Reilly, depending on three factors:  who is likely to have the funniest take on the story of the moment; whether we’re presently annoyed at  Republicans or Democrats more; and whether either of them is off for the evening and being covered by a host substitute we don’t like.

That last one is the deal breaker.   O’Reilly tends to be subbed by a right wing blonde named Laura Ingraham, and I find her more annoying than any other human being in politics except for Nancy Pelosi.  Olbermann’s sub tends to be this bland, sort of not very exciting person who ends up sounding very odd, because the writers are still delivering scripts that are written to Olbermann’s style, and, um..

We’ve been watching more O’Reilly than Olbermann late, since Olbermann’s father is very ill and he’s been taking a lot of time off, but last night, both of them were off.   Greg and  bounced around a bit trying to see if there was anything worth putting up with the sub hosts for, and as there wasn’t, we ended up where we sometimes do these days:  at a show called Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader, hosted by Jeff Foxworthy on–wait for it–CMT, Country  Music Television.

For those of you who are actually interesting in hearing country music, you should know that most of the music is on another country cable station, called GAC (Great American Country).  CMT, which seems to be owned by the same people who own VH-1, is mostly, you know, shows.  World’s Strictest Parents.  Extreme Home Make-over. That kind of thing.

At any rate, we got to thise particular episode of Fifth Grader late, and we found ourselves staring at a young woman who teaches seventh grade world history in the Teach for America program. 

The way the game works is this:  there are two questions from each grade, one through five, up on the board.  Each is worth a specific amount of money, and if you get one right you get that amount of money, and if youget one wrong you get that amount subtractred. 

The young woman had managed to screw up the game to the point that she had ended with exactly $2000 as she entered the bonus round–out of a possible $25,000.  She now had the choice of either taking that money and going home, or taking the bonus question.   If she answered that question correctly, her money was multiplied by ten.   If she answered it incorrectly, it was eliminated, but she got the consolation prize of a pre-paid Visa card with $2500 on it.

Apparently, she could count.   Which was good.  Because the bonus question was in the category of fifth grade American History, and things were about to get ugly.

Her parents were in the audience right behind her.  Every once in a while the camera would pan back to them, and her m other looked like she was in pain.

Here was the questiong:  who was President when the last of the states joined the Union?

I don’t think that was the exact phrasing, but it was the question. 

The yoyung woman stood there and said, “I can’t remember when the last few states joined the country, but I’m pretty sure it was in the mid-1800s, so I’m going to say–John Adams?”

I really don’t make these things up.  I couldn’t make them up.  I barely believe them when I see them.

Believe it or not, this was on my mind for the past few hours because it reminded me of that discussion about process and outcome in the criminal justice system.  Robert has expressed the opinion that the only reason anybody ever goes to jail is because he doesn’t have the money to fight forever, since the process is so stacked against conviction by n ow we’d never convict anybody with adequate resources to fight.

I don’t agree–I mean, I really don’t agree–but I know something else about the justice system, and that is that the vast majority of cases never go to trial.  That’s not because the accused doesn’t have enough money for good lawyers.  Even most rich defendants plead out.

It’s because the vast majority of crimnals make that woman on Fifth Grader look like Einstein. 

And that’s true even when these people seem to be smart enough in their everyday lives.  If you don’t believe me, think about that NBC show To Catch A Predator.  That show has been on for years, and guys are still driving up to those suburban houses in SUVs, armed with sex toys and videotapes–and then being shocked as hell that the whole thing is a sting.

The other reason most criminals plead out is that any good defense attorny knows that most juries lean towards conviction–after all, if he wasn’t guilty, why was he arrested?  And they’re hypersensitive to the idea that “smart laywers” get guilty people off by confusing everybody.

That’s how a substitute teacher in a Connecticut public school got sentenced to ten years in prison and a place on the sex offender registry after ner classroom computer started spewing out porn while she was using it in a demonstration.  A computer can be hit by a virus that  makes it throw up porn images and the person using the computer can’t stop it?  Yeah, right.  If that was possible, we wouldn’t be having this trial!

Juries like to convict.  They tend to think police officers and prosecutors are automatically more reliable than defense lawyers and witnesses.  That’s why when they don’t know somsething–like how a computer virus works–they take the prosecution’s explanation over that tof the defense, even when the defense is right.

Fortunately for the young woman in the case above, the appeal was heard by a judge who did now something about computers, and he threw the case out, voided the verdict and had a screaming fit at the prosecution, but her life is likely to be largely screwed up permanently.

I am not the kind of person who thinks that all police officers and prosecutors are corrupt and care only about getting their arest and convict records up as high as possible.  I know that the Ray Nifongs of this world are blessedly rare.

But I also know that Ben Franklin was wrong.  The only things certain in this world are n ot death and taxes.   There is also human ignorance and stupidity, of which we havee a supply so vast that if we could figure out how to run cars on it, we could give ever man, woman, child and flea their own personal Volkswagen to run for free.

But then, if I’d been on the OJ jury, I’d have voted to acquit–and not because of anything OJ’s lawyers did or did not do.

So, okay, let me try to work my way through this.

I want to get one thing out of the way first.

When I say that punishing an innocent person is a greater wrong than letting a guilty one go free, that doesn’t mean I think the wrong of letting a guilty person go free is negligible. It’s just that I think it’s the lesser of the two evils.

And I’ve got to admit that this is, and has always been, a sort of “thing” with me.  I can trace it back as far as the year I was seven years old–the whole idea of someone being imprisoned unjustly and agains his will.  (My first explosive issue with that came whem somebody explained the draft to me–no wonder I turned into something like an anarchist.)  But the point is that this sort of thing makes me literally physically ill, so much so that I won’t stay in a movie theater if that’s the direction the movie takes, I’ll turn the channel on the television, I’ll dump the book. 

And I never suggested that we should make it impossible to catch and punish actual criminals, only that we should take care first and foremost not to wrongly punish the innocent.  As for perfecting the process, of course I want it perfected, precisely because I think justice resides in the process.  If the process is flawed, then the process is not just, and justice is not served, even if the right person goes to jail.

And I am, as you can tell, talking only about the criminal law.

But is fear really “exculpatory?”  Sometimes it is, of course–if John beats the hell out of Mary three times a week, puts her in the hospital a few times a month, and then gets liquored up and starts chasing her through the house with an axe, it’s certainly the case that her fear of what he’s about to do to her is at least partial exculpation when she kills him.

But let’s say that Mark murders Officer Krupke because he’s scared to death that Krupke figured out he was the guy who robbed the bank–I don’t see any exculpation there at all, and I don’t think anybody else would either, even though Mark might be genuinely terrified.

And the phenomenon I’m talking about has been noted by other people.  My guess is that a good two third of every Ayn Rand villain exhibits it at some point in every Randian novel, especially in Atlas Shrugged.  Henry James noted it, too.

I’m not talking about the ways in which such people may fear the people they kill–I don’t think they fear those people at all.  It’s precisely because they don’t fear them that they kill them.

If that makes any sense.

But let me try to set this up as a scenario, something I think applies fairly well to Robespierre, a little less well to Lenin, and not at all to Stalin–because it requires an “idealist” to get himself into this kind of mental mess.

Take the case of Jedidiah.

Jedidiah is brought up in a religious family, and for most of his childhood he is very devout.  He really does believe in God, and the Commandments, and to live a holy life, as far as that is possible to a child.

As he grows up, however, he begins to resent the whole thing–the rules, and the hypocrisy of religious people and clergy, and the stories about God, which start to sound more and more bogus.

The problem is that if he ditches all that, he’s left with nothing but a long look into the abyss.   Death is final.  All the pain and suffering on earth have no relief.  Everything just plain sucks.

And that’s when Jedidiah discovers the ideology of revolution, which tells him that heaven is meant to be realized on earth and all that religious stuff is just keeping us from reaching the pinnacles of human happiness.   If we throw off religion and redesign society,  human life will finally be happy, pain free and meaningful.

And that one works only until our Jedidiah hits a wall that makes it impossible to deny that heaven can never be realized on earth.  The abyss is part of the human condition, and nothing can be done about it.

Think of is as a kind of reverse Pascal’s Wager

I don’t think Jedidiah is afraid of the people he kills, or that he kills them because he fears them.  In the end, most Jedidiah’s like killing if they kill at all, or they get adept at ignoring the killing that goes on around them, if they don’t.

I think Jedidiah is afraid not only of the abyss, but of the fact that he lost his bet. 

And in the loss of that bet is the complete and utter destruction of a life.

I’m doing this badly again.

But you get this kind of thing on a small scale in some of the more marginal areas of the Humanist movement, people you run across on e-mail discussion lists and those sorts of places.  They go completely ballistic if you say something like, say, that the evidence for the existence of an actual, human person who was Jesus is no worse than ambiguous–that it really cannot be proved that Jesus did not exist at all.

There’s nothing really outrageous about such a statement, nor does anything in it “prove” that atheism is wrong.   Even if we could prove for certain that Jesus really lived and did at least some of the things (let’s say the non-miraculous ones) ascribed to him in the New Testament, that wouldn’t mean that Jesus was God or able to do miracles or even that Christianity is true.

And sane people get this.  When I read arguments about the historical existence of Jesus, I go “mmm, interesting,” and then sort of pass on to something else. 

But these people do not.  They’ll argue themselves and everybody else on the list into the ground just hammering it in over and over again:  nope, Jesus never existed, he never could have existed, it’s completely irrational and superstititious even to entertain the possibility that he existed–

They go, in fact, completely nuts.

This is not the reaction of an atheist.  This is the reaction of a person who still believes at the very core of his being that his original religion is true, who has made a bet against it and who is completely panicked by the implications of turning out to be wrong.

I’m getting that feeling, again, that I’m making no sense.

But it does seem to me that that reaction–the reaction of my guy on the e-mail list above–would explain why “idealisitic” revolutions, revolutions for ideological reasons (rather than just taking over the country so that you can milk it dry) inevitably end up not just in violence, but in violence of a particular kind.

Every once in a while, you do get a Lenin, who is just coldblooded, who pursues violence for the sake of violence.

But I think a lot more of the people involved in these things, both in actual revolutions and in arm’s length support of the same, are doing what my Jesus-just-couldn’t-have-existed guy did.

Okay.  End of blithering.

If there is one thing this blog is good for, it’s reminding me how much of a difference mental frameworks make.

A couple of months ago, I made the statement that I thought that justice resides in the process, not in theoutcomes.  And Robert responded that he did not agree, when the guilty are let free there is no justice.

But when I made my statement about process and outcome,  I wasn’t thinking about the guilty going free, I was thinking about the innocent who are wrongly convicted.  Certainly there are some cases–negligance on the part of the investigators, incompetence on the part of defense counsel, corruption, whatever–where an innocent man wrongly convicted is a case of injustice done, but these are all cases in which the process was not correctly carried out. 

And, of course, letting an innocent man rot in jail once h is innocense is known is also an injustice, but it’s again an injustice of process–once innocence is known, the process is in place to rectify the wrongful vredict.

It’s not that I think there are more cases of wrongful conviction than of wrongful acquittal.  It’s that I think the evil done in wrongfully convicting and punishing an innocent man is vastly more serious than that done in letting a guilty man go free.  To me, no system is inherently just unless the number of wrongful convictions approaches zero.

Yesterday I said something about revolutionary panic, and this time Robert felt that I was giving an excuse for the way these people behavie.

But I don’t think I was making exuses for their behavior.  I was just trying to explain two things to myself, because they’re things that I find inherently puzzling.

The first is the level of personal hysteria that exists in some many of these movements–the wild hyperbole that equates bleeping a few expletives from a sitcom or being turned down for an NEA grant with jackbooted thugs raping your soul.

The other is the inevitable–and it is inevitable, in all utopian esperiements–volcanic explosion of violence and terror. 

It cannot be a coincidence that every single one of these things, from the French Revolution onwards, has ended in the same place, in the trial and elimination of heretics.

And that is what this is, a decent into heresy hunting.  Calling the heretics “class enemies” doesn’t change the nature of what they are for the system that persecutes them.

But think about this for a minute–why bother?  The search of power isn’t enough of an explanation, because very often the resort to terror undermines the power, and it always undermines the wealth and viability of both theleaders themselves.

It’s the difference between Saddam Hussein and Mao, or Pol Pot–Hussein stole from his people and let them starve, tortured his enemies and confiscated anything he could get his hands on , all in aid of living high on the hog and getting to screw more women.  Mao destroyed the technological talent of a generation, and Pol Pot did that and took the agricultural economy along with it–and for what?

It’s difficult to maintain that a Mao wants only what a Hussein wants.  And “power” is less of an explanation than it is another symptom.  There’s something psychiatrically peculiar about this business of “I’d rather have us all dead than admit the possibility that there are people in the world who do not believe that what I believe is true.”

There’s a thought in here somewhere, although I seem to be expressing it badly today.

So, let me speak up for the people who are so desperate to perfect the world.

In their defense, they’re dealing with a lot more than just a sloppy term paper or a holiday project gone bad, or even the building of a bridge or a building. 

On a social level, the history of the world is about as depressing as it’s possible to get, except that real progress occurs every once in a while.  We did manage to develop indoor plumbing and anitbiotics and Sachertorte and a whole list of things that have made life objectively better for a great many of us.  We’ve even managed to invent social structures–liberal democracy, the free market system–that work better for more people than anything that’s come before it.

Even with all that, though, we haven’t eliminated war and probably never will, no have we managed to train ourselves out of the worst of our natures.  Some wars are defensive and some aggressive wars are fought for good reason, but it’s astounding how many wars amount to a vastly escalated version of a fight with a schoolyard bully.

And for all our civilization, there are still places in the world where people are routinely enslaved and tortured and starved to death, just because somebody wants to.

On an individual level, we aren’t much better.  Not only do we rape and steal and kill with no end in sight, but even the best of us are sometimes beset by disease, disability, accident and–finally–death.

I don’t think it’s all that odd that a culture that has ceased to have confidence in a religious denouement to the human story–that is unable to accept ideas of an afterlife of one sort or another, or a vast cosmic plan that fits all the pain and suffering into a meaningful structure beyond itself–would go looking for a way to eliminate all the pain here on earth.

And surely there’s nothing ignoble about wanting to eliminate the pain.  A lot of human progress consists of exactly that–of inventing antibiotics to make disease less lethal to human beings; of inventing surgery for the same reason; of inventing labor saving devices so that more of us have the leisure to think and read and play really loud music while attempting to jetski while stoned.

The most important question in history is, I think, this:  is it possible to perfect the human being, to eliminate once and for all all those causes of pain and misery?  Or is the human story a tragedy no matter what we do to alleviate it, so that we have to find a way to live with it and within it.

By now, most of you know that I’m for the second answer, but I don’t think that the original impetus–to alleviate pain and suffering and death as much as possible–is in any way evil.  The problem is not the goal, but the assumptions made in pursuit of the goal. 

The English Enlightenment was interested in alleviating pain and suffering just as much as the French Enlightenment was, it just made different assumptions about the nature of human beings and human life.

And, like I said, got it right.

I wonder sometimes if the escalating violence of things like the French Revolution, including all the revolutions that followed the same model, isn’t actually a form of panic–if most people, unlike me, do not feel comfortable with accepting a flawed and imperfect life as the only one out there.

I’m blithering. 

But I’m tired.

I once corresponded for a period of three years with a very elderly and very dotrinaire Humanist who was convinced, no matter what evidence I showed him, that the Renaissance followed the Reformation–that the Renaissance was made possible only once “the people” had “broken the back of the Catholic Church.”

He died without ever accepting the reality that the Reformation spelled the end of the Renaissance in every place in Europe except  England–which is an interesting circumstance of its own.

In the end, the Reformation spelled the end of the Renaissancce in England, too, as Cromwell and the Puritans shut down theaters and tried to impose, by law, the kind of plain living and high thinking New England mothers hoped to instill by hectoring.

But there was one thing the Renaissance and the Reformation had in common, and that both had in common with the Middle Ages–and that was the emphasis on the perfectability of man.

Humankind.  Whatever.  I am aware of the fact that changes in English usage are such that it is no longer possible to use “man” as a universal and have it sound right, or even be understood correctly, but my head keeps channeling actual quotations from much earlier periods.

Whatever.  The idea that it is possible to perfect the human being, and that this is a goal towards which both society at large and each individual human should be dedicated, is at its foundations a  Christian one.

Granted that Christianity never expected this perfecting would be completed on earth, there is, from the earliest writings of the Church, a constant and unfaltering emphasis on the project.

Each man is born, the early Church said, and Augustine said more loudly and at greater length, to work out his salvation in fear and trembling.  It was as an aid to this that Confession became a regular and frequent part of the life of the Christian, because Confession was a way to examine the conscience, to make oneself accountable for one’s faults and to commit oneself to correcting them.

And Confession in the Middle Ages was not a matter of walking into a dark little box and coming out with the obligation to say five Hail Marys, ten Our Fathers and a perfect Act of Contrition.  Penitents were instead required to do things like kneel at the door of the church every day for three months, begging their bread, in penance for the sin of pride, or going on foot to the Holy Land, begging all the way again, for such crimes as murder and sacrilege.

What’s interesting to me, of course, was that people did these things, in spite of the fact that the civil authorities did not back them up. 

Of course, the mere acts of human beings could not remove the stain of sin from the soul–and although Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross saved the soul from eternal damnation, which its sins deserved, it didn’t remove the stain either. 

In order to be perfected, man must not only be saved, but must atone for his sins at a lesser level as well, must scrub out that stain, must be made clean.

And that was what pergatory was–and is–for.  Christ removes the eternal punishment due to sin, but the temporal punishment remains.

Think of it like this.  If you murder your wife and are convicted of it and go to prison, you may find religion in prison, join a church, be baptized, and be saved.  You will then n ot need to fear going to Hell when you die.  You will, however, still have to serve out your sentence.   The debt you owe to society–the debt you owe “in time” (temporally)–does not disappear.

I hear a number of people argue, in arguments against religion, that Christian thinking on sin and salvation is fundamentally immoral, because all Hitler would have had to do was confess his sins at the end of his life and be truly sorry for them, and he’d go straight to Heaven no matter how many people he’d murdered and tortured.

In Catholicism, however, this is not the case.  Hitler could indeed confess and e forgiven his sins, but he’d still have to spend a really, really, really long time in Purgatory working off the temporal punishment due to them. 

If you use the standard Catholic image for this, Hitler couldn’t enter Heaven until h is soul had been cleaned of the stain of his sins, and those stains were going to take a lot of time and elbow grease before they came out.

I don’t mean to beat you all over the head with the doctrine of Purgatory, only to point out that the Enlightenment didn’t invent the idea of the perfectablity of man–it just moved the time frame.

And it’s not such an odd thing that it did.  Look at it any way you want to, and humankind looks in need of some perfecting, sooner rather than later.  On the biological level we have disease, disability and death.  On the interpersonal level we have pride, greed, violence and that unbelievably resistant narcissism which seems to be the common theme of all human beings everywhere at every time in history.   On the social level, we have war, tyranny and corruption.

Once people stopped believing automatically in a world beyond this one where wrong were righted, it was almost inevitable that men and women would try to find a way to perfect themselves and their fellow men right here, in the here and now.  The only other choice was to accept evil as inevitable and the essential tragedy of the human story as unrelievable.

The remarkable thing about the Enlightenment is not the bloody Romanticism of the French Revolution, but the measured common sense of the Enlish variety.

Then ask yourself something else.

The Brits were the only ones in Europe–or anywhere else–on the right side of the single most important question in the history of civilization.

So what is it exactly they’re always apologizing for these days, and always to the people who got it wrong?

Okay, I’m not really going to talk abou Robin Hood, even though it’s one of those things that make me all kinds of  nuts. 

If you want to judge just how incredibly messed up our understanding of the Middle Ages really is, Robin Hood would be a good place to start.  We’re told that Robin “stole from the rich to give to the poor,” as if he were some kind of protoCommunist looking to redistribute wealth.

What Robin Hood actually did was rob the tax collectors and give the people back their money.

Think about that for a moment.

And, okay, I did talk about  Robin Hood.

Christian Humanism is, obviously, something else.  For one thing, “Humanism” was the term scholars and  artists in the Renaissance applied to themselves. 

But what’s important here is that Christian Humanism started as a movement in theology, not in the arts or philosophy.

Most Medieval theologians took seriously their mandate to “explain God to man,” and in that capacity wrote mostly about the nature of God and of “things unseen,” and on the nature of revelation.

Aquinas is an obvious exception to this, since Aquinas wrote about everything, but the emphasis in Medieval theology was on the nature of God. 

Christian Humanism begins with a movement among theologians to begin to write and think about the relationship between God and man.  Man is made in God’s image–what did that mean?  If man was such a miserable, sinful creature, then why did God send his Son (who is also Himself) to suffer and die for him?  How was the Bble written, and do we really understand it?

As part of this movement, a number of very important things were done that would have enormous effects later.

The first of these was the production of what were called “parallel texts,” editions of the Bible printed in columns showing the text in various editions and languages.

The two most famous of these were the  Complutensian Polyglot and the Textus Receptus.  The first is traditionally attributed to Ximenes in Spain.  The second is certainly the work of Erasmus in Holland.  The Polyglot is important for its Old Testament.  The Textus Receptus is important for its New.

And both of them made plain to any educated reader that the texts of the scriptures were often different in different places and times, usually only in minor ways, but sometimes with more serious implications.  The texts had not come down to us pristinely, and where there was an issue of translation between languages, there were some issues that definitely needed to be addressed.

The parallel texts marked the beginning of Biblical scholarship as scholarship, rather than just as exegesis.  They also marked the beginning of skepticism for the sake of skepticism, and coupled with the newly wide distribution of ancient texts that had been lost or unavailable for general use for some time, the beginning of what I think of as the quasi-pagan artist.

I don’t mean to imply by that that figures such as Michaelangelo and Leonardo were not believers.  They were believers, passionate believers.  They just also imported, into their art and lives, classical elements that would not have been possible for them at an earlier time.  Not the least of these was a reworking of the status of homosexuality from an unnatural abomination to a sin that was, well, only natural. 

Renaissance Italy was good for that kind of thing.

I’m not an expert on painting and sculpture, but if we believe the people who wrote at the time, the new style, not only the rise and spread of the use of perspective, but the tendency to idealize the human form whether it was presented as human or divine, human or angelic, was directly related to that new theological concern–what does it mean that man is greated n the image of God? 

If man is created in the mage of God, maybe, when we paint and sculpt him, we ought to make him look like it.

What’s always interested me is that the one place where a Renaissance artist could be counted on to produce the figure of a human being that looked realistic and not idealized, it was in images of Christ Incarnate.  Adam reaching out to touch the finger of God on the Sistine is a triumph of human beauty.  Christ lying dead across the lap of the Virgin in the Pieta is as brutally realistic as any corpse in the morgue. 

And with that, I think I’ll head out for the harpsichords.  I know it’s only Saturday, but what the hey.

And the Renaissance. 

As if I  needed an excuse.

But Jem brought up something that’s out there in the air, and that has been out there in the air for centuries, and it’s a misreading of history–a deliberate falsification of history that started in the eighteenth century–that makes it virtually impossible to understand Western intellectual history in any coherent way at all.

First, the rise of intellectual atheism did n ot begin in the Renaissance, but in the Enlightenment, and especially in Eighteenth Century France.  The philosophes were the first to reject Christianity in particular and traditional religion in general in any systematic way, and they were also the ones who established the narrative about the history of science and the arts that most of us now just assume must be true.

That narrative went like this:  first there were the Middle Ages, which were dark and benighted, ruled by a tyrannical Church that surpressed science, burned people at the stake for making scientific discoveries, and forced everybody to concentrate on God and their own sinfulness by spending all their time on their knees begging for mercy.

The first break came with the Renaissance, when science valiently struggled to be free of religious schackles and the Church condemned Galileo for proving that the earth went around the sun instead of the other way around.

The second break came with the Reformation, as people threw off the superstitions of Catholicism and broke the stranglehold of Church on science and learning.

The final and most important break came with the Enlightenment, when man finally overthrew all vestiges of irrationality, and valiantly chose to put reason over religion.

I’d say that that particlar narrative, or something like it, is what most of my generation was taught was the progress of culture in the West, and versions of that narrative remain with us in the New Atheist narratives of Dawkins and Harris, who are still casting themselves as the brave ational Scientists beset by the forces of superstittion represented by “fundamentalists,” Creationists, and Catholics.

Unfortunately, that particular narrative of cultural history is, in virtually every item, wrong.

Let’s start with the Middle Ages.

First, far from concentrating only–or even mostly–on God, the Middle Ages was one of the most determinedly pragmatic periods in all of Western history.

The Middle Ages invented the university as we know it, and the great universities that arose in this period were largely concentrated on training…lawyers.

Yes, I know, lawyers don’t sound all that pragmatic.  But one of the other things the Middle Ages did was reestablish and extend the rule of law, first conceived and implemented in classical Rome, then obliterated first by the excesses of the Empire and then by the great invasions.

This was not a small thing.  Amost everything we like about Western culture over and above other cultures depends on the rule of law for its very existence.  It’s in the Medieval reconstruction and reimagination of the rule of law that the idea of separation of church and state first appears in Western thought.  They meant something different by it than we do, but they did mean it.  For a while, kings and governments were forbidden to put priests and religious on trial secular courts for any reason whatsoever.  Beckett ran afoul of King Henry because he refused to allow Henry to try a priest in a crown court…for murder. 

Nor were the Middle Ages short on science.  It was Copernicus, not Galileo, who proved that the earth revolves around the sun rather than the other way around, and Copernicus was a figure of the high Middle Ages, not the  Renaissance.  

What’s more, his work was not suppressed, but celebrated.  It was taught throughout the Medieval schools and universities, including at the Vatican’s own school. 

The Middle Ages saw advances in many areas of science and technology, not only in astronomy but in agriculture, architecture and engineering.

Even that staple object of derision–how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?–wasn’t as stupid as it came to sound, but just a way of formulating a uestion about the nature of the soul.

So what did the Renaisance do?

It ushered in the reign of something called Christian Humanism.

I’ll get to that tomorrow.