On the Edge of a High Place.

March 27th, 2008 Posted in Cadre, Alternate Worlds, Prostitution, Concrete incident or process, Anti-Experiment

In the movie “A Man for All Seasons” an historical event is transformed into a dramatic narrative. Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) engages in a political disagreement with King Henry VIII of England (1491-1547) over divorce and the organization of religion in England. More is killed and his death is now seen as an act within the context of this unequal struggle.

Even though there is some historical complexity here I will simplify and outline an abstract model of a class of social events that are similar to the Thomas More experience. There is a political controversy that becomes severe enough to transform into attack against person rather than issue. A civil limit is passed, a disagreement becomes a conflict.

A second model with which we are all familiar. A criminal act is uncovered and a miscreant is punished.

Both of these models can be made to fit the More-Henry VIII affair. More either committed treason and was justly punished or Henry VIII and his crew attacked him as part of their political campaign and subverted law to a private purpose. Or perhaps both. Or even neither.

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The Governor Spitzer case leading to his abrupt resignation from office seems to take the same form and to even share the same ambivalence–difficulty choosing the correct model. The governor was identified as a client of a prostitute and was publicly embarrassed. As state attorney general and as governor he had prosecuted and criticized others for the same acts he was committing. On top he was threatened with impeachment (almost immediately) and with possible felony charges involving solicitation and transportation. A crime had been committed and a miscreant was on the road to punishment.

This was the first spin–a suggested interpretation of what had happened. It grew out of the Department of Justice legal charge against the small prostitution agency that supplied the hookers-for-hire to the governor and at least nine other customers. The governor was the only client whose name (along with details of his actions with the sex workers and facilitators) was leaked to the press. Neither he nor any other client were charged.

Some part of the press and the public called attention to the political context that had received short shrift initially. The governor in his executive and prosecutor positions had encountered opponents who were enraged enough to be considered enemies. Serious threats in both directions had been reported in the news media and legal investigations had been started or encouraged by each side against the other.

This second spin suggested that the outing of the governor might have been related to these political struggles. According to regular police and prosecutor procedure the governor’s name should have remained anonymous. Was there a connection between the two seemingly separate situations?

The general presumption among investigators of the concrete-real events is that the rolling out of the action takes one and only one form. There is an exact truth about the event that can be accurately described later. All the occupations and professions that deal with the concrete-real have established ways of matching event with narrative. They all have their methods. They have ways of collecting, evaluating and presenting information that are based on commonly held professional tests for truth. Just mentioning these several jobs (all involved in searching for a social truth) will call to mind dramatic or technical descriptions of these methods in movies, novels, articles, textbooks. In random order we have journalists, lawyers (and judges), detectives, insurance adjusters, legislators (at hearings), spies, talent scouts, military intelligence agents, accident investigators, medical doctors and psychotherapists and, of course, assorted practical sociologists and associated students of society.

But in all cases the matching of event with description is imperfect. There is a gap. Some acts are not recoverable. In Pynchon’s novel “The Crying of Lot 69″ a critical fact that could explain everything that follows disappears into a social amnesia. No one can remember it. There is also the refusal of a fact that contradicts a moral conceit. Misidentification of suicide attempts distort its statistics. Like in calculus, the true value can only be approximated. And in the world of social action it is sometimes impossible to even estimate how far the narrative may be off the mark. Spin is the social plaque that fills this ambivalent space. The struggle over interpretation tends to be part of the larger political confrontation.

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The kind of situation we are describing is constantly surfacing in the world of politics and government. A contentious front verging toward conflict constantly overflows the social restraints of our civilization. The adversary aims to damage the other (whether individual or grouping) instead of the other’s purpose or ideas.

There is a vulnerability to such attacks. Cadres at high levels of power constantly confuse self-interest with their responsibility for the people’s business. But in the heat of battle even trivial private acts may be attacked or a charge may be unjustly invented. At base we have the sovereign’s presumed prerogative of being above the accepted morality. Liberty for all turns on the restraint of governing cadres at all levels.

If a model can be fitted to the case at hand we have an understanding. Where two or more explanatory models are in play and a decision among them can not be definitively made we are left with a continuing mystery. In the majority of cases an official and public consensus is reached.

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We are into the concrete-real, the anti-experiment, so the discussion of the social patterns and cultural tendencies will usually only explain part of what happened. Character and personality, biological drive, divergent perceptions, a traffic jam or flash flood might also be involved. If we had some way of apportioning these divergent influences–giving each its correct share in the outcome until, like Goldilocks eating the baby bear’s porridge, it is all gone–we would have achieved a general explanation. Something like climbing Mount Everest.

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Meanwhile there are other sector’s in the governor’s case that call for separate attention. The institution of commercial sex opens out like an alternate universe. We have this ongoing conventional ideal of sexuality bound within the family of procreation or at least within a love relationship. It is one of our central institutions yet with almost a slight turn of the head we seem to find one of its negations. Sex as a commercial transaction, the orgiastic moment for the client totally surrounded by indifference and all the consequences of the act off in another direction. So the governor stands balanced between three worlds–a cadre leader of his state, a head of a conventional family and a trick at the Mayflower Hotel. Standing back these and similar not quite congruent social settings which we integrate within ourselves are not unfamiliar for most of us.

Then there is the disparity in the enforcement of the law–priorities in official attention to the range of crime (prostitution drops in value, the news tells us, as terrorism rises); bias in the targets for enforcement, different orders of punishment. This is not surprising but disconcerting none-the-less because it can be a cover for a biased prosecutor. Or is there a luck of the draw at work here, the gov called out while the other nine johns shelter in the shadows.

Also the civil libertarians fear that the expanding of electronic and other technologies and methods in the search for terrorists and people stealing from the public treasury can be an intrusion as well into the private lives of the rest of us. The dolphins are gathered up in the same nets with the tuna. Should they be thrown back into the ocean (back to the groups who love and need them) or be canned with the rest of the poor fish?

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The sovereign’s dilemma can also be found in work sites, corporate suites, in faculty organizations, trade unions and wherever there are struggles over power and decision.

There are two tests for the sovereign’s dilemma. (1) Is the criminal charge valid? Would the same charge be made in a situation where the political conflict did not exist? (2) Is there a bias in the police work and the prosecution that suggests an extra-criminal criteria of selection?

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Of course political differences do not invariably degenerate into conflict. Large numbers stay within civil limits and democratic norms. The conditions that separate the two categories are another story. If, though, you are wrestling on the edge of a high place, you and your opponent might consider stepping back.

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Notes: A few other political disagreements that edge toward illegal actions.

 

* Iran-Contra. Political disagreement over war in Nicaragua associated with an illegal sale of arms to Iran. The stories recalling this case tend to emphasize the undercover work of President Reagan’s team, later found to be illegal, rather than the political impasse between them and the Democrats in Congress.

*Disagreement over war in Vietnam and a national political contest were associated with break-ins of opposition party’s headquarters and into office files of an opponent’s psychotherapist. President Nixon allowed his political actions to slip over the line to crime and then fell into a futile cover-up. His purpose was always political.

*A continuing drumbeat of charges and investigations against a centrist President Clinton by the dissenting radical right over extra-marital affairs, real estate deals, gifts, suicide of staff member, missing documents and points west culminating in impeachment and trial of the Pres. His political and governmental acts always seemed modest and limited except for the extravagant list of Presidential pardons in his final days in office. Recollection of the hate toward him of the radical right Republicans is still astonishing.

*Profumo Affair. British War Minister unknowingly shares a show girl with a Soviet military diplomat. A case where the inappropriateness of the event goes beyond politics. Not sure that this case fits our thesis but it was a massively big news story in 1963.