940413.1130 Hal pepinsky@indiana.edu, to Bill Leach's "PCT is not
philosophy!"
Bill, the first time I got fired it was because I was doing philosophy
and not sociology, as I discuss below. Here's one time where a long
post of mine seems most apropos.
By the way, I notice in the cover letter circulated yesterday I look
in vain for a simple example illustrating how PCT principles has helped
people handle a real problem. l&p hal
fn=fj4124. at
ftp.indiana.edu/pub/departments/criminal_justice/pepinsky
hal PEPINSKY@INDIANA.EDU Feminist Justice--April 12, 1994
DIGEST
Yesterday, Joan Pennington, Executive Director of the
National Center for Protective Parents in Trenton, New
Jersey, visited with those of us involved in the seminar,
and spoke both to a law-school family law class and to this
children's rights and safety seminar.
Knowing that we in the seminar knew the plight of abused
children and protective parents, Joan turned from her
customary role of training (would-be) lawyers to reviewing
with us how she sees the plight of children as, essentially,
a problem of gender politics.
In the course of that discussion, Joan used a single word
which struck me hard, to explain the denial of judges and
everyone else which we have confronted throughout the
semester. The word--as in describing how judges react to
allegations that biological parents, middle-class white
fathers particularly, are raping their own children:
unthinkable.
In this essay I explore how injustice rests on keeping our
understanding of the world unthinkable. I use the occasion
to respond to Tom Bernard's criticism of my geometry book--
that as an exercise in theology my analysis is inherently
UNscientific, UNscholarly. Inspired by how freely Joan
spoke in the seminar last evening, late in the semester,
I indulge here in so-called deep thoughts. In the process,
I acknowledge my deep sympathy with and fascination for the
occult and for the meaning of the grotesque rituals some
folks act out in the name of understanding the occult. In
my arrogance I generalize to all human interaction 
Hal
The Beast 666-666/666
Dear People,
JOAN PENNINGTON, AND TALKING ABOUT THE UNTHINKABLE
As "unresponsiveness" defines violent action to me, so
"unthinkable" defines violence against self-expression. The
definition--fractally as usual for me--takes the same form
at all levels of social discourse. When people tell me it
is unthinkable for them that a president of our country
could be a more cold-blooded, threatening, deadly murderer
than the worst we can find on any death row, they tell me
that our president is free in their eyes to do whatever he
pleases and never be treated like today's death-row
murderer. In any argument over the proposition, I find my
"opponents" or skeptics dancing around the evidence at hand.
Rather they find reasons to discredit my sources such that
no evidence they present is "scientifically valid," hence
real, hence thinkable in "scholarly" print. Tom Bernard for
instance has even acknowledged in print in no less than the
American Society of Criminology's newsletter THE
CRIMINOLOGIST (in which he reviewed my geometry book last
year), that he at his religious, confirmed Church of the
Brethren roots agrees with me that violence begets violence,
and yet, to become a scientist with regard to criminological
theory, he must acknowledge that such faith is not
empirically testable, hence outside the bounds of legitimate
criminological discourse. I find it strange that Tom
settles for blind faith. I find it necessary to test my
faith and trust daily, and find that a great deal depends on
learning not to repeat my own or others' restrospectively
glaring mistakes. Tom, I infer, takes the position that he
can never "know" anything that makes one's own crucial moral
distinctions, made in the daily routine course of human
interaction.
I don't mean to single Tom out as representing the problem
of making violence and justice unthinkable. It is only that
I deem his stand fair game because he has already published
that stand as a basic criticism of my work. What Tom says
of my criminology talk is the same as what so frustrates and
enrages Joan about judges' saying that a protective parent's
evidence of child abuse is "unthinkable." The judge will
not look at the evidence because it would be unthinkable to
grant so high a social/political standing to the child who
cries not to go off to be beaten, raped or worse with a
parent, especially with a father. It is unthinkable that we
could have the family and the values of family loyalty and
yet deny fathers the right to raise/educate/relate to
"their" children alone as they see fit. It is unthinkable
that the accused standing before the court in such nice
clothes, with so upstanding a community reputation, with so
many dollars to hire ruthless legal assistance, could really
be an abuser. Clearly, the allegation presents an
emergency. The responsible judge is called upon to act
decisively. Since it is unthinkable that outwardly so
respectable, hardworking parent could be so undone by a
child's words, since action is of the essence, since the
family unit so badly needs legal support, you have to get
the child away from the hostile, angry, out-of-control
parent before you and into the quiet respectable one's
hands.
It is unthinkable to interfere in the handling of someone
else's child. It is a breach of propriety. It is rude.
You're so far outside the situation you cannot possibly
understand the whole story, and so you had better not
presume to butt in. The corollary for the judge given
evidence by a protective parent is that the judge dare not
intrude into the family's privacy, let alone presume to
second-guess the details of family life there, let alone
presume to leave the child better off tomorrow than today,
by allowing anyone to believe that the child's status will
hang in limbo, or that the judge will intrude further into
matters appropriately left private--out of the eyes and
surveillance of the state, out of the bedroom in particular.
JOAN PENNINGTON: THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE IS AN ACT OF
GENDER POLITICS
Various net discussions, notably from Indian subscribers
harking back to Vedic traditions, have given me to refresh
my memory of Asian history and to explore corollaries of the
shift from "partnership societies" and "dominator societies"
which occurred roughly 2500 BC in what has become Europe and
the Middle East. An exploration of occult thinking and
practice, inspired by references Phil Jenkins--the Penn
State criminal justice expert on cults and moral panics--has
been giving me--leads me back to the folks who had pyramids
built for them and wrote hieroglyphics about it as the
original Aryan, patriarchal empire. It was Aryan in that
the nubians built the pyramids, while the light-skinned
pharoahs were the ones they were doing God's work for.
The rituals of the Egyptian Book of the Dead strike me as
the private, fractal corollary of public patriarchal
greatness--the capacity to do grotesque violence to whole
masses of sub-human subjects and sleep well at night, making
one's violent public authority rest on private moral
conviction and acts of deepest faith. The pain imposed on
Nubians was redeemed by the sacred sacrifice--ultimately--of
one's first-born "son" (which in fact could as easily be a
girl, but which symbolically reflected profoundly misogynist
notions of ultimate male sacrifice)--by a male priest
outside the circle. When after the passage of a few
millenia Herodotus happened on the scene, he chanced upon a
fertility rite, where he observed a high priestess getting
screwed by a goat. Aleister Crowley (English, 1875-1947,
died as pretender to the throne of the Knights Templar (as
head of the Ordo Templi Orientis--the order of the Eastern
temple, first HQ of the crusade troops' palace guard. He
picked up on Herodotus's report, and turned it into his
drawing of Baphomet--a goat's head on a male body--Crowley's
portrayal of the chief god of Freemasonry. Crowley found a
"sacred" hook on the most misogynist portrayal of female
surrender to beastly conquest imaginable. Thereby, the
beast (as Crowley called himself, actually "Beast 666"---
where 6 symbolized the very tetrahedron at the heart of my
own theory of loving interaction) fertilized the passive
mother-of-all-life incarnate. The sacrifice of the first-
born son--presumably figuratively conceived in the high
fertility ritual--further symbolized ecstasy and closeness
to god and divine understanding in killing and even
devouring the thing greatest love imaginable--that of a
father patriarch for his first-born, biologically "natural,"
heir.
Some say that that beyond manifestly absurd but eminently
"thinkable" acts Crowley orchestrated like trying to have a
male goat make it with one of his wives--"The Scarlet
Woman"--at his temple in Sicily at the vernal equinox, then
recording in his diary that he substituted for the goat when
the goat's manhood failed. Among the variety of intoxicants
and drugs he used was mescaline, to this day the documented
hallucinogen of choice in occult fertility rites and
sacrifices. Part of the "mystery" of all the Crowley tales
is how much Crowley himself was hallucinating the grotesque
experiences he celebrated in prose and verse. It is easiest
to me to suppose that Crowley's deeds did not stop with the
at least partly thinkable, ridiculous fertility rites or
animal sacrifices, and the logic of the "mysteries" of
super-Masonic orders indicate that Crowley's initiation into
the 96th degree of the OTO consisted in remaining in
conscious touch with what was happening enough to describe
necrophilic anal intercourse in verse in such vivid detail.
Joan Pennington dares to think that one reason so many
children get so outrageously returned to abusers in my home
state of Ohio is that those privy to Crowley-style mysteries
today reach in intergenerational networks right across the
judiciary and law enforcement--no different in kind from how
children's complaints of SRA are treated as unthinkable the
world over as far as I can see--but in this country
exceptional in concentration and degree. The paradox of the
unthinkable is that the more serious the allegations and
evidence of danger presented by a child scared to go "home"
alone with a parent, the more unthinkable they become to
anyone who entertains the notion of taking the allegations
and evidence seriously. Far better to allow ourselves a
reasonable doubt that any such complaint could be true,
better to leap at every reassurance the well-dressed, well-
represented father offers, better to let one's imagination
into the "mysteries" of the child's family life venture no
further than the fleeting thought that children have been
known to seduce their parents. Hey, Freud said we all at
least fantasize about being seduced by fair young bodies-in-
action. And if judges can treat the allegations and
evidence as unthinkable despite the heartfelt pleas of child
and protective parent, the parodox of unthinkability means
that defining interaction with the child as abusive is most
unthinkable for the actual abuser--and as such, to our
continuing frustration, most resistant to "treatment."
I think Joan is quite right about the centrality of gender
politics: beneath all the argument over whether any of us
is entitled public to think abuse is real, we cling most
passionately to the faith that our survival and social order
rest on family reunification, to having family members not
as freely chosen by each of us, but as god-given, ideally
led by a strong male role-model.
FROM THE ACADEMIC TO THE REAL
The flak protective parents take to me echoes the flak I and
professorial colleagues take when ultimately, we question
professional icons like the faith that surviving three blind
reviewers doth a really meaningful research report make.
One of the ways that my senior colleagues at my first job
(at Minnesota, 1970-72) justified their conclusion that my
continued employment was unthinkable was that my writing was
"philosophical, not scientific." The effect on my claims to
the legitimacy of my classroom and publication talk was
precisely the same as that of a judge who throws a
protective mother into a mental ward for being too
emotionally involved in a child visitation issue. My job
was taken as surely as the mother's child gets returned to
the father.
The difference in the world of child abuse and protection
that has opened to me the past several years is that not
only is the effect real, but the complaint is commonly of
immediate, life-threatening significance to the body of the
complaining party to the dispute. If I was "philosophical"
in Minnesota, today I'm being asked for counsel by a lonely,
frightened mother-in-hiding. While before I might have felt
my own honor and seriousness of occupational purpose were at
stake, to say nothing of a paycheck (which today is about as
secure as one could imagine), today I know damned well I'm
being eminently practical and empirical about people who are
no more than coding categories of what they have reported to
a stranger, in a form set by the researcher, on terms set by
the researcher, about concerns defined by the researcher. I
am pretty secure about the empirical foundation for all that
crazy philosophizing of mine. I find empirical confirmation
in the real healing, confidence and material progress (e.g.,
seeing one's child, stopping a child's being forced go home
alone with an abuser), and real disconfirmation in how real
people suffer real pain from their or my miscalculation.
Thinkable fantasies only become grotesquely, frighteningly
acted out in private relations--as between parent and child--
as the fantasies become unthinkable publicly. After class
last night as some of us partied a survivor/protective parent
read out a serious of blatantly misandrous riddles about white
men, particularly big white men. I laughed freely with her.
Joan chimed in and we guessed most of the riddles as she read.
My male member was never in danger. I allowed myself to think
the unthinkable: that had I not been trustworthy--had I abused
her trust rather than screwing up and guessing wrong now and then,
had I ever tried to dictate her choices rather than simply offer
advice when asked, until she affirmed she understood--I could
not so freely laugh with her anger now, accepting the innocence
of sharing my own homosexually-oriented S&M fantasies, with
particular white men in mind--some I've known close up, some
far away.
Fantasies like this survivor/parent's are--practically speaking--
a sign of highly conscious self-discipline in noticing, apologizing
for and being repulsed out of acting the fantasy out.
Correspondingly, those whose personal honor and purity of public
face is most prized are those I assess as most highly at risk
for private, covert, hidden, occult, misogynist, ageist bestiality.
They fit my profile of the privately Crowley-like publicly pious
and self-righteous churchgoer or elder--the apostate, the worshipper
of hierarchically constructed icons, whose own mysteries set him
(or occasionally her) apart to tell the godforsaken suckers what
they need to keep them from thinking about one's own bestiality.
The latter's a way of life I've been all too close to myself in
walk after walk of life; its material success by definition rests
on compartmentalizing the sadism and terror of private rituals
from the unreportable, hence by all manner of public discourse (from
yours and mine to reporters', child protection investigators',
judges', teachers' and parents'), the most thrilling, meaningful
private interaction must by all means remain publicly unthinkable.
And the prophecy fulfills itself, as our private complicity in
in violating others threatens to be disclosed from among those
we truly hurt and kill. (Here too, I allow myself to think the
unthinkable reality Terre Haute, Indiana, native Eugene V. Debs
is so famous for declaring to his sentencing judge: while there
is a soul in prison, I really don't feel free. I also allow myself
to think publicly, as here now, about my complicity in murder all
over the globe, when for instance I eat a banana picked by
a campesino condemned to die of insecticide poisoning.) I
believe there really is a multi-cephalic meeting of minds that
extends freely across all classes and occupations that one's
own personal ass rests on making any sign of public thinking
particularly about sexual, ritual, homicidal child abuse, unthink-
able.
In my cosmology organized, coordinated, militarily defended violcnce
is my devil. Much as I try, I can't stop even my nearest and dearest
friends' torture, let alone stopping the unthinking violence we're
all implicated in globally if not cosmically. I don't even pretend
I can rescue those who suffer most and most closely to me, like
Debbie, Mary, Keith, Suzanne and Sandy and their children. (Think
of how they feel!) Shit happens. As Mary counseled especially
young activist survivors among us at the party last night, the
system--which is to say our collective capacity to make children's
complaints unthinkable except as insane or as unthinkable for
ourselves--which I now suppose to have made the pyramids possible--
will long survive us. No victory--supreme court victory, legisla-
tion, coup d'etat, whatever--noticeably reduces the terror even
in a single victim. I allow myself to think so, publicly.
Survivors express relief that they don't have to explain to
me why they feel likewise. Together we think the unthinkable,
notably that no social problem that matters ever will be solved
by us, let alone for us. We can control public discourse, but
there's no suppressing the inner terror of life with unthinkable
fantasies and realities alike.
MEASURES OF JUSTICE
I gather that one reason, which Joan all but explicitly stated,
that she felt free to drop her usual text and speculate--as I do
here--on why we keep on failing to keep children from being sent
home by judges and concertedly hunted by the FBI as a historical,
cultural phenomenon, from a distance. We in this class have
dared validate, let alone think, the routine suffering even of
the most grotesque, normally unthinkable kind in our own
neighborhood.
As private feelings of helplessness and doubt become publicly
thinkable, I keep finding remarkable, personally transformative
power in the smallest deeds. For instance, Debbie and Mary
keep telling me Debbie got out of jail a year ago December
because of a single thing I told them at the time: in the
bogus attempted murder charge as in all lawyer-client relations,
the client is boss. If you want witnesses your lawyer doesn't
want to call, you owe him or her an explanation, but the witness
list--like everything the lawyer does or not do--is the client's
to decide, as long as the request is lawful and the client or
someone else can pay for it. When it was clear that Debbie
would call the witnesses of her own choosing, ace-prosecutor
Bob Beck backed off going to trial. He was in no position to
persuade Debbie's sentencing judge to drop her attempted murder
bail from $350,000 to recognizance, surely a record bail reduction
so late in a prosecution. I can see it is plausible that when
Debbie and Mary believed my advice, and found that their lawyer
had no grounds either for refusing or for withdrawing from the case,
two crucial things happened: First, they assumed command rather
than waiting on lawyers or anyone else to decide what was best
for Debbie and her children. Second, they moved a seeming legal
mountain.
I have seen the same dawning awareness of personal rights among
many grievants or accused I have helped. I marvel at how obvious
and risk-free my advice is, at how little it is to me, and at how
oblivious I am at the time of how much a simple act of mine will
turn out to mean to others. Joan Pennington celebrates that same
power, as when she serves as an expert witness and hears her
explanation of a protective parent's plight has decided jurors
to convict her of voluntary manslaughter rather than first-degree
murder in having her ex-husband shotgunned to death. Everything
Joan told us she described on the stand would surely have been
obvious to anyone the mother had even ten minutes to tell her
plight to. Simple, obvious to tell, and yet profound in the
"expert" license it gave jurors to make the mother's tale thinkable.
(And of course, even more crucially, Joan had to make the mother's
story thinkable to herself before she had a prayer of making it
thinkable to anyone else.)
Conversely, at a collective level, a little thinkability implies
a lot of progress toward human rights. Mary also observed last
night that she recently found young women romantically entwined
in male lovers' arms to break free, step forward, and sign petitions
she offered decrying genital mutilation and dowry deaths a marked
contrast to how young women of her generation would have held back.
Women waited to sign after their men, if then. Now they sign first.
That may not seem like much, but it rests on widespread and
painful women-led generation-long struggle. If it is unthinkable
to consider this change significant, there's nothing but blind
faith left to indicate hope for empowering women and children
(and all of us as we are oppressed) to gain safety at any time
in the near future either.
Here's to thinkability, and to Joan for coming all the way to Bloom-
ton for no pay, for giving so freely of herself and her rich legal
experience, and for making the unthinkable more thinkable for
a wide range of people, including a classful of chronically cynical,
reputedly conservative Hoosier law students. Thanks Joan!!
Love and peace, Hal