Insidious Evil

What do you think of when you think of “insidious evil?” Evil we understand well. It refers to actions that have no redeeming virtues, acts of mass murder, extreme forms of abuse, or enslaving human beings. Add "insidious" to the mix and you get evil that creeps up on you, that works gradually to destroy, and that works slowly to destroy.

Neil Strauss doesn't see things in quite this way.

Until last weekend I had not heard of Neil Strauss. But then he wrote an essay for the Wall Street Journal in which he revealed that his idea of “insidious evil” was the “Like” button you find on newspaper and magazine sites, on Facebook, and on other forms of social media.

At first, I thought that Strauss was not serious. How could any sentient human being pretend that the “Like” button is an “insidious evil?” How could he call on everyone to: “rise up against the tyranny of the ‘like’ button?”

To call it rhetorical overreach is too easy. One begins to suspect that the author is trying to be ironic or that he is pretending to have a sense of humor.

If none of those are true, then we are getting to witness someone showing off his mental deficiencies and acting the fool.

Sad to say, Strauss means exactly what he is saying. He wants to convince us that the “Like” button represents a new low in human behavior because it promotes conformity.

As we all know, when it comes to therapy culture values, conformity is Public Enemy No. 1.

You know about conformity. It’s occurs when people follow the same rules, respect the same customs, and even dress to fit into the group. Soldiers in uniform conform. Artists do not.

Strauss is at war with conformity because he thinks that it undermines self-esteem. And we all know that we are supposed to be bowing down to the gods of self-esteem.

The self-esteem culture has helped produce the most self-centered, egotistical, and narcissistic group of young people in our history, and yet, if you dare suggest that there is anything wrong with it, you are going to be accused of promoting conformity, stifling creativity, and colluding with “insidious evils.”

One wonders how anyone could advance such a theory with a straight face.

By now we should have realized that the self-esteem culture, the one that teaches young people to let it all hang out, to express themselves openly and honestly, to remain in close touch with their deepest personal feelings is major impediment to normal psychological development and socialization.

Let’s examine Strauss’s argument. He begins with a hypothetical. It isn’t really accurate, but let’s ignore that for a minute. He writes: “When the Internet first came into public use, it was hailed as a liberation from conformity, a floating world ruled by passion, creativity, innovation and freedom of information.”

True enough, some people thought that the Internet was a force for human liberation. Those who thought so were the people who believed in a form of liberation theology and who wanted to see their beliefs confirmed in everyday life.

The rest of the wold understood that the Internet would have an extraordinary influence on the way people do business, on the way people work, and on the way information is distributed.  

While the blogosphere and different forms of social media were touted as a way for everyone to express him or her self, that is hardly what the Internet is really about.

Why does Strauss denounce the “Like” button as the root of some insidious evil? It’s good to read his words, because otherwise you might believe that I am exaggerating.

In his words: “Just as stand-up comedians are trained to be funny by observing which of their lines and expressions are greeted with laughter, so too are our thoughts online molded to conform to popular opinion by these buttons. A status update that is met with no likes (or a clever tweet that isn't retweeted) becomes the equivalent of a joke met with silence. It must be rethought and rewritten. And so we don't show our true selves online, but a mask designed to conform to the opinions of those around us.”

He continues:: “‘Like’ culture is antithetical to the concept of self-esteem, which a healthy individual should be developing from the inside out rather than from the outside in.”

And this: “Form your own opinions of something you're reading, rather than looking at the feedback for cues about what to think.”

Think about the hapless stand-up comedian who ignores audience response, who continues to tell the jokes he wants to tell regardless of whether anyone is or is not laughing. Would you consider him to have high self-esteem or would you advise him to go back to his day job?

Let’s note in passing that when you are arguing for free and creative self-expression, you should not regale your readers with platitudes and banalities about the need to esteem our true selves. Otherwise someone might think that you are merely echoing what everyone thinks in order to be liked yourself.

And you would do even better to show a minimal understanding of the way human beings connect with other human beings.

In his article Strauss is merely promoting the kind of self-esteemist nonsense that encourages people to be egomaniacs and narcissists. He might believe that self-esteem is an inside/out development, but if he does, that just means that the theory is designed to produce social dysfunction.

If you follow this principle, and express yourself freely and openly, without regard for the opinions of others, without regard for how you look to others, and without regard for whether or not you are connecting with others, you are going to become socially dysfunctional. I guarantee it.

Strauss is not even right to say that the “like” culture promotes conformity and makes everyone think the same thing. It allows us all to moderate the expression of our views in order to connect with other human beings.

If you follow the self-esteem culture to its bitter end you will end up without friends and without human connection. If you think that this is healthy, then clearly you need help.

Everyone knows, or ought to know, that if you want to connect with another human being, you must consider that  person’s thoughts and feelings. When we are engaged in the most personal communication, face-to-face conversation we are constantly modulating our expression, the better to maintain contact with our interlocutor.

It doesn’t make you a conformist; it makes you respectful and sociable.

If you ignore the response to your remarks, if you are so obtuse that you continue discussing a topic that your friend finds obnoxious or offensive, you have not expressed your true self, you have imposed yourself on your friend.

If you follow this bad advice often enough and you will find yourself friendless.

On Alan Dershowitz, Casey Anthony, and Me

Yesterday I offered a few remarks about the Casey Anthony trial. I have not been following the trial, and have no opinion about whether or not she did what she was accused of doing.

Besides, everyone has an opinion on the matter. I didn’t see much advantage to offering mine, as uninformed as it would be.

Instead I offered my perspective on the American criminal justice system. I felt that those who are assuming that the system is designed to discover the truth of what happened have misunderstood it.

My opinions are worth what they are worth. They are not coming to you from a credentialed law professor or from someone who is qualified to opine on matters judicial.

When Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz offers an opinion on the workings of the criminal justice system, he brings with him some very serious credentials and qualifications.

When it comes to trial law, Dershowitz knows whereof he speaks.

So, I was heartened to read Dershowitz on the Casey Anthony trial in the Wall Street Journal this morning. Mostly because his argument corresponds in most particulars to mine, especially as regards my topic, the American way of truth and justice.

I am relieved to think that I did not mislead anyone on this matter. Now, as you read Dershowitz, you can say that you read it here first.

Tristane Banon Accuses DSK of Attempted Rape

Consider this an addendum to my previous post, especially to the part that concerns Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s attempt to recover what Bernard-Henri Levy calls his “honor.”

It doesn’t have the weight of court room testimony, but the words of Tristane Banon will surely influence public opinion, in France at least. Since Banon is filing charges against DSK for attempted rape, she might  have the opportunity to testify under oath about her experience.

John Rosenthal summarizes an interview Banon did with the French magazine, L’Express.

If you read French you can follow the link to the French version of the interview. For my part I find her presentation very compelling, to say the least.

Since I was viewing the French version on Google Chrome I made use of it's translation function and had the article translated into English. In my view, it did a creditable, though somewhat imperfect, job.

Truth and Justice, the American Way

I haven’t been following the Casey Anthony case, so I have a good excuse for not having an opinion on whether the case was decided correctly. I do, however, find it strange that America seems to have rushed to condemn the jury, going so far as to say that juries cannot be trusted because citizens are simply too stupid or too easily influenced to come to deliver justice.

I recommend that we think long and hard before discarding the jury system... because, if you follow the anguished cries of outrage to their logical conclusion, you would want to do away with trial by jury.

Given the public sentiment, no one has taken the occasion of the Casey Anthony verdict to quote the immortal words of British jurist William Blackstone: “Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."

Coming fast upon the Dominique Strauss-Kahn imbroglio, the Casey Anthony case has provided us all a lesson in the workings of the criminal justice system. We have learned, to the dismay of many, that the system is not set up to find out the truth of what happened or even to mete out perfect justice.

We should remind ourselves of the famous dictum of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. to the effect that the court system is really about playing the game according to the rules. And that this is not the same as doing justice.

As we saw in the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, it’s not so much about who did what do whom, but about what you can prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” in a court room.

It sometimes happens that the rules of evidence make it impossible to introduce information that would determine culpability. It might also happen that the leading witness be shown to be a liar.

If the complaining witness lacks credibility, and if her story contains inconsistencies, that does not mean that her accusations are false. It does mean that a jury will reasonably entertain doubt about her account of the events in question.

It seems clear that DSK and the hotel maid engaged in a sex act. It seems also to be clear that the act was sufficiently violent to have bruised the victim. Yet, since rape trials hinge on consent, prosecutors hesitate before going to trial with a witness who has no credibility, and who seemed to have wanted to try to profit from her new-found notoriety.

If the victim was sexually assaulted, justice will not be done. That is the way the game is played.

To the criminal justice system the Sofitel hotel maid is not credible. And yet, this morning Yale professor Mike McGovern offered a somewhat different take on the question, one that is worthy of attention. Not so much because it will change anything about the outcome of the case, but because it will allow us to ask some of the questions that very few people have been asking.

McGovern is an authority on living conditions in Guinea, the accuser’s home country. He is well placed to add some empathy to our considerations.

McGovern makes a simple point. Before you judge this woman to be a pathological liar attempting to profit from her own distress, ask yourself what you would do if you were living in abject poverty and were being subjected to severe abuse?

If you were living in those conditions, if you saw an opportunity to get a visa to come to the United States, and if you were told that you could only get a visa if you had been gang raped, what would you do? Would you lie?

It sounds harsh to put it like that, but it also rings true.

Let’s say that this woman was actually the victim of a sexual assault. She is a poor immigrant woman from Guinea. She is not wealthy or well-connected.

Now she would be facing another kind of choice. If she testifies in court her name will be on the front page of every newspaper in the world. She will be stigmatized beyond anything that any of us can imagine. Worse yet, she will be publicly humiliated by the best defense attorneys in New York.

Or else, she can drop the case in return for a financial consideration.

As we know, representatives of DSK flew to Guinea to offer a financial windfall to the hotel maid’s family.

If you were in her shoes, if you were facing that choice, would you choose to testify in open court?

In the larger scheme of things, this means that the threat of criminal prosecution is not the most effective deterrent against sexual violence.

But, as we have seen in the DSK case, and as we are seeing in the Casey Anthony case, the court room is not the only place where justice is meted out. People who are accused of crimes are also judged in the court of public opinion.

In that court they are not subjected to imprisonment or fines, but they are subject to loss of reputation.

Which brings us to “perp walks.” Public shaming, the kind that DSK was subjected to, does stigmatize individuals, regardless of whether they are innocent or guilty.

Thus, many countries forbid them. In America, where shaming is still an important sanction, they are still used.

And yet, perp walks do not protect the innocent from unjust accusations.

This might make us all feel that an injustice is occurring, but, in truth, reputation is quite fragile under normal circumstances. It often happens that someone’s reputation is damaged because of rumor and innuendo.

If the attack on reputation takes the form of slander, libel, or character assassination, a person has legal recourse. Still and all, whether or not you keep or lose your good name rarely depends on the verdict offered by a jury.

It does, however, depend on the way you look to your peers. Surely, we all can influence how other people see us. We can act with dignity and decorum at all times; we can honor the rules of proper conduct. We do not have complete control over the way we look to others, but we do have some control.

As we all know by now, regardless of what happened between DSK and the hotel maid, the former head of the IMF did not have a history of treating women with a great deal of respect.

We understand that the perp walk damaged his reputation, but that damage will be partially undone if and when the DA drops the charges.

Yet, that is not the whole story. The indictment of DSK produced an important reaction, most especially from a woman named Tristane Banon.

Banon is not a poor immigant; she is an accomplished journalist, the daughter of a friend of DSK. After seeing DSK accused of rape in New York, Banon came forth for the first time and accused DSK of having tried to rape her several years ago.

To Tristane Banon the charges against DSK were credible. To her they seemed to be part of a pattern.

Thus, she measured the value of avoiding the humiliation that often befalls those women who dare testify against their rapists against the value of exposing DSK for what she knew him to be.

Should we now join Bernard-Henri Levy in bemoaning DSK’s lost honor, or should we be more concerned that BHL’s great and good friend failed to respect the honor of we-don’t-know-how-many women.

Exercise as a Stress Reducer

Far more people know that they should exercise regularly than actually do it.  

They know that regular exercise can do wonders for their physical and mental health, but they do not seem to have a good enough opinion of themselves to want to enhance either.

It’s become trendy to obsess about plastic bags, the better to show how much you love Nature, but it is worth considering that you will do yourself, your nation, and maybe even nature, a very large favor if you get into an exercise routine.

You are probably not paying for your health care, but just think about how much lower everyone’s insurance premiums would be if we all exercised regularly.

If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for your country.

If not for you or your country, you can do it for science.

Sort of... One of the ways we try to persuade people to exercise more is to demonstrate scientifically that it confers real benefits.

The research showing that exercise is good for you is a lot more solid than the research showing that psychoactive drugs are good for you.

Today’s research, from the National Institute of Mental Health, demonstrates that a mouse that exercises regularly will be better able to deal with stress, especially the stress that comes from abuse or bullying.

This might sound somewhat frivolous, but keep in mind that some of the most interesting research about the causes of depression comes to us from studies about mouse behavior.

To be brief about it, it is possible to induce a mouse into a state that mimics depression. You do so by first teaching the mouse that it will get some food if it presses the right lever. Then you simply make it that the mouse will not get any food no matter which lever it presses.

Given the futility of action the mouse will become demoralized and give up.

If you are dealing with the stress that accompanies abuse and bullying, weight training or martial arts training would probably be helpful. If we want to help children defend themselves against bullying, a course of Kung Fu will surely work much better than will earnest entreaties to stop it. We are never really going to stop schoolyard bullying; why not figure out ways for children to defend themselves against it?

If you are not a mouse, and you want to defend yourself against abuse, you should work on developing another kind of strength, strength of character.

The two are not mutually exclusive. You need strength of character to engage and pursue regular exercise. But sticking with a regular exercise program will strengthen your character as well as your body.

The Return of Frank Rich

Maybe you have to live in New York, but in my neighborhood the return of Frank Rich is news.

A few months back that the famed New York Times columnist disengaged from the Gray Lady-- New York’s term for the Times-- and jumped  to New York Magazine. Presumably, the magazine was going to provide him the opportunity to write longer essays... though one doubts that the New York Times Magazine would ever have denied Rich anything.

Let’s stipulate that Frank Rich is an excellent writer, in the sense of being a prose stylist. While his thinking rarely rises to the level of his prose, he is still terribly influential among the New York cognoscenti and the pseudo-cognoscenti.

Nowadays I see Rich as a cultural artifact, a way to glimpse the mind of the liberal intelligentsia, the mind that gave us Barack Obama.

When you read Frank Rich you should always remember that he is, by training, a drama critic. He sets the stage very well, and he milks scenes for all of their drama. Yet, he is so concerned with dramatic gesturing and posturing that he rarely provides the kind of insight that would really show us how to solve a problem.

When Rich entitles his first New York Magazine article: “Obama’s Original Sin,” you know that you are entering the world of grand drama. You may recall that “original sin” refers to Eve and Adam’s inability to resist eating the fruit of the tree of good and evil. If you had forgotten the Biblical reference, the backdrop of the magazine story offers a glimpse at part of a painting depicting the momentous event.

Later, the term came to refer to the fact that human reproduction necessarily involved a sinful act, the act of coitus.

You also recall that many Americans have long considered slavery to be America’s original sin. Those who believe in dramatic solutions to problems promoted the presidency of Barack Obama because they believed that he would redeem the nation from the sin of slavery.

To their limited minds, a dramatic solution would heal whatever has been wrong with America.

We haven’t been hearing very much about this lately. The liberals who were trafficking in these myths seem to have discovered that Barack Obama has not been quite the Messiah they imagined.

So, Frank Rich writes a long article about Obama and original sin, without mentioning the notion that slavery was America’s original sin. That means that the earlier narrative is no longer useful.

It’s time for a new narrative. This new one is not about how to get Barack Obama elected. Rich doesn’t quite say it, but it’s about protecting liberal New Yorkers from having to recognize how wrong they were about Obama. It’s also about protecting liberalism from one of its great failures.

Rich sets the stage well. He opens his article at the rededication of the New York Public Library, an institution that symbolizes what Mayor Bloomberg called: “free and open access to information....”

Here we find the New York intelligentsia congregating, in an atmosphere that fulfills the requirements of multiculturalism-- there’s a choir from the Abyssinian Baptist Church-- and that includes great writers like Toni Morrison, lesser writers like Jonathan Franzen, journalists like Frank Rich, and, by the by, representatives of the financial class, like the CEO of Bank of America, Brian Moynihan.

The only dark side was the presence of a diabolical force, private equity magnate, Stephen Schwarzman, a Republican whose name had been forever graven into the library building. As Rich puts it: “At the centennial gala, you couldn’t escape the paw print of Stephen Schwarzman, the Blackstone Group billionaire whose library gift had entitled him to blast his name on any stray expanse of marble on the 42nd Street building.”

When you compare someone to an animal, you are putting him on the side of the devils. In recognition of Schwarzman’s enormous donation to the library, the liberal elites treat him with undisguised contempt.

By now Rich is getting into his subject: “On that Monday night, the Republican Schwarzman was a political outlier in the crowd, which was dominated by New York’s liberal elite, financial and cultural divisions. Even Moynihan has been a faithful Democratic donor. These were Obama’s people (myself, yes, among them), and the worldly, let’s-turn-the-page spirit in the library that night uncannily reminded me of the hubristic vibe of Obama’s White House: The worst of the downturn is past, the wobbly economy will eventually creep forward, let the healed too-big-to-fail banks move on, and pray that the lagging indicators (i.e., employment) will catch up. Indeed, it’s a certain swath of the New York liberal elite that helped reinforce that Obama mind-set to begin with. Uncorrected, it could lead the president to defeat in 2012, even against a roster of opponents that almost everyone there that night would cavalierly dismiss as clowns.”

With the exception of Stephen Schwarzman, this is the crowd that brought you Barack Obama. To maintain your status within the group, you must dismiss all Republican presidential contenders as clowns.

But, if the Republican contenders are clowns, Barack Obama is a joke. If Rich is any indication, the group is none too proud of itself today. After all, it elevated a man without qualifications, though not without qualities, to the American presidency. It failed to understand that such a man could only run the country on his own hubris.

Perhaps, these great thinkers are not quite as smart as they think they are.

If you think that they are going to arrive at such a realization, you have a long wait.

Rich explains that Obama’s problem is America’s problem: there has been no reckoning for the financial crisis of 2008. No one has been held responsible; no one has paid for his role in the debacle; nothing has been done to prevent another crisis from descending upon us.

In Rich’s words: “What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country: the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers. Nor have there been meaningful reforms that might prevent a repeat catastrophe. Time may heal most wounds, but not these. Chronic unemployment remains a constant, painful reminder of the havoc inflicted on the bust’s innocent victims.”

Regardless of whether you believe that the leaders of the great Wall Street financial institutions belong in jail, Rich is right to say that most of them have not paid any real price for the crisis.

Forcing them to pay a price, either through the criminal or civil courts, might well be great political theater, but one doubts that it will solve the country’s more basic problems.

Anyone who imagines that it will has not gotten over the notion that politics is theater, and that the grand dramatic gesture of electing Barack Obama would save America from its original sin.

Why has the Obama administration failed to hold the financial class to account? Rich seems to know it without really knowing it, but the people who brought us the financial crisis, the people whose companies and agencies were most intimately involved with the great mortgage scam, were, in large part, Democrats. They were major donors to the Democratic party and to the Obama election campaign.

To imagine that Obama is going to turn on the people who financed his campaign and whose support gave him credibility is like saying that he would sell out the labor unions, trial lawyers, government bureaucrats,. and left-wing activists who also supported him.

To his credit, Rich traces much of the problem to policies enacted during the Clinton administration. In some ways the strangest part of his article is what Sherlock Holmes called “the dog that didn’t bark:” Rich does not blame the Bush administration.

This does not mean that he does not blame the Bush administration. It means that he recognizes that the blame-Bush narrative has outlived its usefulness.

Who does Frank Rich blame? None other than Robert Rubin: “The roots of Obama’s capture by the corporate axis of influence inexorably trace back to his own personal Zelig, the former Clinton Treasury secretary and Harvard Corporation stalwart Robert Rubin. In The Audacity of Hope, published in late 2006, Obama called Rubin, then busily cheerleading the excessive risk at Citigroup, ‘one of the more thoughtful and unassuming people I know.’ Two years later, when Citi cratered and threatened to take the economy with it, Rubin demonstrated his unassuming thoughtfulness by denying that he had anything to do with the toxic investments that cost taxpayers a $45 billion bailout and 52,000 Citi employees their jobs.”

Rich is disappointed in Obama. I am convinced that, among the New York intelligentsia, he is not alone. Take the full measure of his condemnation: “But Obama is the chief executive. It’s his fault, no one else’s, that he seems diffident about the unemployed. Each time there’s a jolt in the jobless numbers, he and his surrogates compound that profile by farcically reshuffling the same clichés, from ‘stuck in a ditch’ to ‘headwinds’ (first used by Geithner in March 2009—retire it already!) to ‘bumps in the road.’ It’s true the administration has caught few breaks and the headwinds have been strong, but voters have long since tuned out this monotonous apologia. The White House’s repeated argument that the stimulus saved as many as 3 million jobs, accurate though it may be, is another nonstarter when 14 million Americans are looking for work.”

Of course, Rich is still a true-blue liberal Democrat. He may be willing to label Obama a failure, but he is no fan of Mitt Romney.

In his words: “If any belief unites our polarized nation, it’s the conviction that Romney is the most transparent phony in either party, no matter how much he’s now deaccessioning hair products. It’s also been a Beltway truism that a Mormon can’t win the Republican nomination, let alone a Massachusetts governor who devised the prototype for ‘ObamaCare.’ But that political calculus changed overnight. That this poseur could so quickly gain traction, even if evanescently, should alarm Obama.”

Any Republican primary voters who think that Mitt Romney will be a formidable candidate should pay special heed to what Rich is saying here. He is pointing out that liberal Democrats are not afraid of Mitt Romney.

What are they afraid of? For the most part, they are afraid of being held accountable for the political failure that is Barack Obama. Above all else they do not want to pay the wages of their own sins, and they despair at finding a new savior who could redeem their guilt.

Violence Comes to Christopher Street

While Mayor Bloomberg was out marching for gay pride, New York City’s gay Mecca, Christopher Street, was being overrun by violent crime. Link here. Via Instapundit.

The New York Daily News reports: “Christopher St., the Village's most iconic block, has been taken over by drug peddlers, prostitutes and marauding youths, residents and shop owners say.

“Teenage troublemakers regularly wreak havoc along the colorful strip of boutiques, bars and restaurants extending from Seventh Ave. to Hudson River Park, merchants say.

"You take your life into your hands when you come down here, especially after dark,’ said Bob Goodman, 69, who has lived in the area for more than three decades.’Friends of mine have been mugged. Places have been broken to. There are fights all the time.“Crime has spiked in recent months, prompting cops to step up patrols and longtime residents to retreat indoors.

“‘I''ve never seen it like this. Fifteen years ago, you could walk down the street and you wouldn't have to worry about getting mugged on your way home’."

Where has Mayor Bloomberg been? As Glenn Reynolds suggests, he is been acting like Nanny Bloomberg, fighting the good fight against trans-fats and cigarette smoke.

Of course,  these Nanny state solutions to the city’s problems bespeak weakness, and weakness invites violent crime.