Power, Persecution, and Peril

I was listening to segment on a podcast episode about the mythology of Chanukah. Specifically, it pointed out that the story gave an important framing and narrative to right-wing Zionists in Israel.[1] "We are--and have always--been a people under attack! We must fight!" It reminded me a lot of what I had written extensively about before regarding Evangelicals and Republicans (see here, here, and here). Why this narrative, though? Why do the strong need to tell a story about themselves being weak?

Before the modern era (i.e. pre-1517), the powerful definitely saw no need to justify power. Power was self-evidently good, and power was the ends. There was no need in this world to deign to appear weak. Modernism, however, changed these norms. With the rise of individualism and democracy, power became suspect. It was not as if power went away; it still worked as it had before. Suddenly, though, the powerful needed a way to couch their power within the new modernist sensibilities. Power, if it appears baldly, is risked. If one's power is too obvious, it can be stripped away. To protect and consolidate power, the powerful must ironically paint themselves as persecuted. To do otherwise is to imperil their power. In other words, the first must make it at least appear as if they are the last.

Take for example the current Republican Party that, though controlling all three branches of the federal government (not to mention many state governments), still campaigns on the idea that Democrats were not just a threat but somehow magically able to enact and block policy as they saw fit.

Take for example the annual "War on Christmas" rhetoric that gets ginned up this time of year. Evangelicals, who enjoy widespread cultural and structural advantage in the United States (not to mention numbers), are somehow restricted from saying the words "Merry Christmas" in public.

--

[1] To be clear, Diasporic Jews have been and in many ways still are persecuted. The same cannot be said of Israeli Jews. Just ask Marc Lamont Hill.

Structure and Sexual Misconduct

We appear to be in a watershed moment. The floodgates have been opened to a seemingly endless cascade of sexual misconduct claims, ranging from the rape of minors to inappropriate and undesired language. One reaction I have heard is lament: "When will the accusations end?" This is understandable. However, I tend to see things much more optimistically: This is what social change looks like. It's uncomfortable and ugly and disappointing but good, good because it signals a change in norms. We are together affirmatively stating that such behavior is no longer acceptable; moreover, such behavior will be sanctioned. In a way, a desire to "make it all go away" is a wish to return to a time when our silence tacitly approved of such behavior and, thus, allowed it to continue unabated. As disquieting as it is, this is progress.

What's more, I think we can start to talk about the social structure and culture that has possibly and ironically elevated those among us who are more likely to do such deviance to positions of power, authority, and celebrity. Think about the presidency as an example. It takes a special--and not in a good way--person to consider him- or herself qualified to be the most powerful person in the world. To look at the impossibility of that political office, at the crushing and awesome responsibility it affords, and to say, "Sure, I could do that!" is the height of hubris. Not to mention the gauntlet one must travail to ascend to the catbird seat. We should not be surprised that virtually all candidates for president are, to some degree, clinical narcissists. We should recognize that it is a system of our own design that elevates people with these characteristics (and indeed perhaps even engenders these attributes) and that these very characteristics are what make such people feel entitled to act as they please without fear of consequences. Think Nixon and Watergate or Kennedy and Clinton and their sexual dalliances. Narcissism is not so much a personality disorder as it is an inevitable result of our way of doing social order. It is more bad society than bad actors.

This line of thinking can easily be translated to the systems that elevate movie stars, musicians, comedians, Senators, and CEO's. All require and encourage antisociality. This isn't to say that such behavior is confined to these fields. We ordinary folks are not immune. It is, however, an empirical question worth investigation: do people in positions of power, authority, and celebrity do sexual misconduct at a disproportionate rate?

An even more uncomfortable question to ask is, inasmuch as these elites, whom we've elevated, embody our ideals, what does this say about us?

Does the Pope Age in the Woods?

In case you hadn't heard, there's a new pope. Lots of first with this one. First Jesuit. First from the Global South. (See my previous posts on this here and here.) First to take the name Frank. Like all of the contenders (and virtually everyone eligible as well), though, he's theologically conservative. He is vociferous, however, in his support of the poor, which is consistent with his membership in the Society of Jesus (a/k/a the Jesuits). The cardinals seem to have been rather two-faced with this election, though. He's from the South--but he's white. He's Jesuit--but he's conservative. He's different--but he's not. It's surprisingly politic. There is something else telling here, though.

Nate Silver had an interesting post over at FiveThirtyEight yesterday about the age of the popes. He notes that

Cardinal Bergoglio, 76, is probably the ninth oldest of the 266 popes at the time of his election....

He goes on to write,

...[T]he cardinal electors might have seen Francis’ age as an asset...because the cardinals are also quite old: 72 on average. ...If Francis serves for 5 to 10 years, a considerable number of the cardinals will have another opportunity to steer the course of the church by voting again on a pope, something that would have been much less likely had they selected a candidate in his 50s or 60s.

Interesting food for thought. Given the monarchical nature of the papacy, the College of Cardinals are very limited in the power that they can exert. Essentially, they elect the Pope and then get out of the way. (It'd be interesting to see an analysis of the cardinals over time, particularly what the average number of papal conclaves over a career has been and how that has changed.) Imagine the U.S. Senate electing the president for a lifetime appointment and not getting to pass any laws. It seems that this system no longer serves the best interests of the Church in several ways (which I won't get into here). The Church, though, is inherently conservative in its design, favoring tradition over cultural accommodation. Because they have no other way to control the direction of the Church, the cardinals keep the popes on a short leash by increasingly making sure that the popes tenures will be short because of their advanced age. Moreover, old popes, like old people in general, are likely to behave rather conservatively. While there is little motivation for those in power in the Church to make these changes, the Church could make itself much more vibrant and relevant by getting some young(er) blood in the papacy, but that would necessitate democratizing power both among the clerical hierarchy and between the clergy and the laity.

Two-dimensional Power and the Gun Debate

After the shooting at Sandy Hook, Ezra Klein wrote:

When we first collected much of this data [about guns and mass shootings in the United States], it was after the Aurora, Colo. shootings, and the air was thick with calls to avoid "politicizing" the tragedy. That is code, essentially, for "don't talk about reforming our gun control laws."

Let's be clear: That is a form of politicization. When political actors construct a political argument that threatens political consequences if other political actors pursue a certain political outcome, that is, almost by definition, a politicization of the issue. It's just a form of politicization favoring those who prefer the status quo to stricter gun control laws.

Lisa Wade at Sociological Images succinctly paraphrased Klein, writing:

…silencing a discussion is just another form of politicization.

The debate-about-whether-to-have-the-debate has been a relatively successful discursive tool for those who are pro-gun. Every high-profile occasion of violence involving guns is met with calls for a moratorium on political conversation. This tactic has much in common with the two-dimensional view of power. Clawson, Neustadtl, and Weller in Dollars and Votes outline three increasingly complicated views of power. They are:

• common conception - the ability to make someone do something against his/her will
• two-dimensional view - the non-articulation of a problem so that its omission is not recognized as a wielding of power
• field theory - the altering of social space by powerful agents so as actors are forced to orient toward the agents

Clawson et al. use pollution as an example for the two-dimensional view. In the 1960s and 1970s, before the modern environmental movement had brought it to the fore, pollution was simply not on anyone's radar as an issue. The ability of industry to keep a conversation from happening was itself a use a power, one all the more powerful because of its invisibility.

When individuals insist "Now is not the time," or "We should help people mourn instead of being divisive," they are--even if unwittingly--doing two-dimensional power, indefinitely delaying the debate and re-articulating the problem to make it about timing instead of the substantive issue, effectively cloaking the very use of power.

When a Pope Spanks the Nuns: Women, Power, and Jesus

Why the sudden Vatican crackdown on American nuns? The recent spat between the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) and the Vatican and the nuns' highly publicized bus tour is so intriguing that it borders on farce. Is the crackdown isolated or part of a larger program? Are we finally seeing Ratzinger the Inquisitor re-emerging from the papal vestments? Is it gendered? Is this a patriarchal institution reasserting the dominance of men over women? Does the social isolation created by incredible hierarchy and forced celibacy blind the church fathers from the inevitability of the lay backlash against their disciplinary actions? Lots of questions.

NPR's Barbara Hagerty has this conjecture: "Perceiving its core beliefs to be under threat...the Vatican and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops are pushing back." I think she's on to something. Sociology has pointed out this same phenomenon among other social groups, like middle class white men, who see their status as being under threat. As society progresses, offering once marginalized groups (e.g. women) increasingly egalitarian status, the relative status of those who were once solely in power (e.g. men) shifts. This can be terrifying to the once-powerful. Societal progress is then met with reactionary politics and regressive policies. The irony, of course, is that this kind of theological and political conservativism is a sign of weakness, a kind of death knell.

For another take on women and religion, here is a succinct little video of the New Testaments scholar and Anglican bishop Tom "N.T." Wright talking about the overlooked leadership of women in early Christianity (h/t Rachel Held Evans):

Hyperbolic Victimhood

Let me begin with a disclosure and a caveat. I have never been the victim of sexual abuse, and in no way am I excusing, rationalizing, or dismissing child sexual abuse with what I write below.

With all the fallout at Penn State this week, I've been thinking about how we talk about the victims. Is it possible that we cause more harm to victims by insisting that their experiences are catastrophic? Recent research summarized by the American Psychological Association indicates that:

Some children even report little or no psychological distress from the [sexual] abuse.... They may experience no harm in the short run, but suffer serious problems later in life.

In the past, we made sense of this by inventing the now-discredited notion of "repressed memories." Today, we might be tempted to think about this in terms of a "sleeper effect," in which the pain is simply lurking under the surface, waiting to emerge at some future point.

I would like to purpose an alternative explanation. Perhaps, by insisting that child sexual assault is so thoroughly and permanently damaging to the psyche, we are creating a situation in which victims are forced to play the "ruined victim" role. Why would we do this? I think that it might be because the issue is the intersection of two culturally troubling concepts, sexuality and childhood.

Childhood as a part of the lifecourse is a social construct. It wasn't that long ago in human history when we treated children essentially as short adults. When we were still an agricultural society, we needed all of the manual work that we could muster; we simply couldn't afford to make a distinction between kids and adults. We still make exceptions today for children who work on farms, allowing them to drive automobiles at an earlier age than their more urban counterparts and exempting their families from the usual child labor laws. It isn't until the industrial revolution that we really start to think of children as somehow different. As kids became competition for adults in factories, we pass the first child labor laws, booting kids out of the labor force. Rather than allow the kids to muraude around the streets reeking havoc, we make education compulsory and stick them in schools until they're adults. As a further way to inact social control, we start to think about children as uniquely vulnerable, both physically and psychologically.

We have always had our hangups about sexuality in the West. The connection between patriarchy, gender norms, and heteronormativity have left us with an experience of sex that is intimately connected to power. Men are aggressors who strive for power and domination. Women are passive and are thought of as generally being asexual or at least resistant to sexual advances. Notions of romantic love thus conflate social power and status with physiological and emotional stimulation. It's essentially BDSM lite.

So, sex is about power, and childhood is about vulnerability. Put them together, and we end up with deviance that seems particularly egregious, and we insist that the aftermath of this hyper-deviance must match-up in its direness. It then becomes deviant for a victim of childhood sexual assault not to exhibit the debilitating psychic fallout that is expected. It might be that this socially forced victimization, rather than the abuse itself, causes the late-presenting distress. In other words, perhaps victims don't learn until adulthood how upset they are really supposed to be.

--
UPDATE: I also feel the need to state this is no way should be read as an apology for Paterno, Spanier, Schultz, or Curley and certainly not for Sandusky.

The Dictionary Sucks

I chastise my students when they cite dictionary definitions in their papers. Mostly, I do this because it gives them a false sense of security and blinds them to the processes of how meaning is created and how power is reproduced. (It also often signals that they haven't been doing the assigned reading and/or listening in class.) Turns out, they're in good company, though. The Justices of the SCotUS have been relying more and more on dictionaries over the past two decades. That just seems lazy to me.