What "Everyone Knows" About NAMBLA and Historical Methodology

[X-posted to the Valve.]

Reading through the complete (online) works of the handsome Benoit Denizet-Lewis, I found the following paragraph (warning: long) on the North America Man/Boy Love Association:

Curley family attorney Larry Frisoli flatly compares NAMBLA to the Mafia. "NAMBLA is a criminal organization that teaches its members how to rape kids," he says in a conversation in his Cambridge office. "To say that age-of-consent laws should be changed is fine; it's legal. But to actually encourage and assist in the abuse of children is illegal. If you look at The Godfather, in the '40s and '50s, the Corleones always got up there and said, 'We don't exist.' Yet they did exist. And NAMBLA does exist. And it has tiers of membership. And like the Mafia, the question becomes how much can you blame the Godfather for what the foot soldier on the street is doing?"

The evidentiary standards set by Curley family attorney Larry Frisoli lack a little something in the substance department.  To prove that a conspiracy of pedophiles exists in the face of overwhelming evidence that it doesn't, Frisoli compares it to the fictional counterpart of La Cosa Nostra.  One could say that this tactic works on the analogical level because "everyone knows" that Puzo based the Corleone family on LCN.

But shouldn't what "everyone knows" be based on fact instead of fictionalization?  Shouldn't the Curley's attorney appeal to the inner-workings of LCN instead of what Puzo imagined them to be?  Otherwise Frisoli transfers to what he believes an actual conspiracy the attributes of Puzo's fictional one.  The oversimplification involved in such a move isn't merely explanatory either.  Unlike a scientific analogy intended to communicate the complexity of a process by baby steps, Frisoli's analogy is an end unto itself.  No further learning involved:

If NAMBLA is structured like La Cosa Nostra, then it is a criminal conspiracy.  Frisoli invokes The Godfather not to explain the workings of a more complex network but to explain away the complexities of any bureaucratic organization . . . by pointing to an imaginary one in which all actions are intentional and all consequences the result of premeditation.  "Everyone knows" that Michael Corleone is responsible for the infamous Baptismal Bloodbath.  Thus "everyone knows" that all pederasts intend to kill the likes of Jeffrey Curley.  From analogy to intention to conviction via a single fictional leap.

As much as this particular analogy bothers me—and lest I be misunderstood by those who could only want to misunderstand me, I'm not defending Curley's murderers nor NAMBLA here—what bothers me more is the insistence on the logic of what "everyone knows."  Because not "everyone knows" all that much about anything.  At least that's what it seems like today.  But irony of ironies:

My dissertation is predicated on the notion that there are some things that "everyone knows" and that these things are so pervasive they appear in almost all the literary and popular writing of the period.  So when reading a surprisingly (given their its and general approach) thorough and convincing historical work I shouldn't stumble choke die on sentences like:

Whether or not Lincoln read this article . . . he couldn't have avoided such a widespread and commonly accepted argument.

Because he could have.  I do it all the time.  I avoid common arguments because what "everyone knows" to be true often isn't . . . and yet when I write about historical moments I try to inhabit a notion of what constitutes the norm in ways that I find laughable when applied to contemporary culture.  Like Frisoli's application up there.  How different is his assessment of the impact of The Godfather from the average historicist's assessment of the popularity of say some Jack London novel?  No matter how informed the reading it is liable to fail many tests many times for many reasons.  I'm not sure I like that but I don't see many alternatives.  If we recreate the past to fit our image of it again and again and again then how are we better than the New Dealers who invented Social Darwinism to justify their policies? 

Comments

[Porlock Junior]

Being a sranger here (probably having arrived via the King Kong thread), I presume I'm missing large chunks of the basis -- the things everyone knows, in fact -- for a lot of what's being discussed. I can accept that; but this is peculiarly mystifying:

"the New Dealers who invented Social Darwinism to justify their policies"

I suppose their policies are not being characterized here as social-darwinistic, but rather as having been politically defended as a counter to s.d. Or maybe I've even got that part wrong?

But in what sense was the New Deal inventing a position that had been widespread since before the turn of the century? When poor old William Jennings Bryan turned from defending workers and farmers to battling Evil-lution, he was (according to one narrative that seems credible) in reaction against Social Darwinism; he just messed up disastrously in his analysis of where the problem was.

(BTW the OED's citation for social Darwinism from 1887 does not make it entirely clear whether anyone else was using the term at that time; but the 1907 citation is a reference to others' use of the phrase. It would be interesting to know whether, as that quotation implies, the term was coined by the opponents of social darwinism and not by Haeckel and that crowd who advocated the idea.)

So, returning to the point, what is it that the New Dealers invented in this connection? Perhaps the idea that s.d. was widespread and dangerous? Is the contention that in reality it was just a fringe notion?

[Stephen]

You're about to get a condensed version of Acephalous' dissertation, Porlock.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Porlock Jr., as Stephen said, you've stepped into dissertation territory . . . but instead of condensing my dissertation, I'll address the questions you asked directly and hope I don't bore you with too much detail. That 1907 citation in the OED is the best place to start. It's from this article by Lester Ward, the point of which is to demonstrate that there's no American equivalent to the European application of Darwinian "ethics" to social problems. As Ward himself says . . . nevermind. I can't seem to access JSTOR anymore. I'll quote the passage when I can access it again. The general point Ward argues is that the phrase "social Darwinism" has currency, but no one knows what it means and no one outside of William Graham Sumner claims to be a "social Darwinist." My thesis, quickly, is that SD is a philosophy designed to scare children, er, citizens into dismissing the purported social Darwinist. I've a mountain of evidence to back this claim (it's literally teetering on my desk as I type), but if you're disinclined to take that on faith, I'd recommend Robert Bannister's Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought.

The reason I consider SD a myth popularized by the New Dealers isn't because 1) I want to vilify them or 2) because SD didn't previously exist as a rhetorical ploy but because Richard Hofstadter's Social Darwinism in American Thought, originally published immediately after WWII, attempted to justify the New Deal (and explain the origins of the Depression) by attributing all evils in the world to social Darwinistic thought. This move is particularly problematic when you consider 1) its pernicious effect on the relation of scientific thought to social policy since and 2) how it buried the reformist strains of evolutionary thought beneath the general opprobrium for all things evolutionary.

Scared you away yet? I can elaborate, if you'd like, but know that you've asked this dissertator his favorite question: "What are you working on?"

[Porlock Junior]

Yes, looking idly at your bookroll as I composed my question, I began to see that I was getting somewhere near dissertation territory, but I thought I'd ask anyway, having never read (or till now heard of) Hofstadter's book. Your comment sounded odd to this non-student of the subject because stuff which one might (and I tend to) loosely call social darwinism comes up constantly and routinely and casually in political conversation, letters to the editor, and that sort of unscholarly talk. Not formal theory, of course, but something like folklore. One figures that the folklore came from somewhere, just as practical businessmen, in Keynes's observation, are followers of dead economists whom they haven't heard of. But this, I guess, is pretty far from academic theories of the importance of social darwinism.

Your two problematic points I can well understand, or I think I can. It occurs to me that the serious social darwinists in Europe may have had a significant effect over here, through the reaction of people like Bryan. If he really got started on his regrettable last crusade because of opposition to those European ideas, then Haeckel and Spencer and all helped to give us the Dover PA case. Is that too far-fetched?

[Ray Davis]

The phrase "Social Darwinism" may not have appeared in print until 1887, but my readings of Brooks and Henry Adams certainly indicate that it existed in some form before then. Brooks Adams, looking back in 1919 at a book he wrote in 1886:

"The last generation was strongly Darwinian in the sense that it accepted, almost as a tenet of religious faith, the theory that human civilization is a progressive evolution, moving on the whole steadily toward perfection, from a lower to a higher intellectual plane, and, as a necessary part of its progress, developing a higher degree of mental vigor."

(Porlock Junior may be amused to learn that support for Bryan's earlier crusade against the gold standard was, in the Adams circle, very much tied to Darwinist concerns, and that Brooks's pessimistically Darwinist proto-Spenglerian book, The Law of Civilisation and Decay was considered irresponsibly pro-Bryan by Republicans like Roosevelt and Hays. But nowadays creationists are the most rabid social Darwinists: the Lord helps the fittest who help themselves.)

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Ray, that quotation there "from a lower to higher intellectual plane," reads like pure Spencer, a variation of progressive evolution from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. While that may be called "social Darwinism," it's in fact (as all of Spencer's thought fundamentally is) a Lamarckian concept of progressive evolution. Any notion of progress, esp. as it relates to social theory, entails an idea of "natural" development absent from Darwinian theory proper, but pervasive in all the more comforting "evolutionisms" about which I'm dissertating.

As to whether or not the ideas to which to the label "social Darwinism" was later applied existed, well, they did. But as Bannister points out in the aforelinked book, they had more rhetorical currency than actual adherents . . . this particular cluster of ideas, in other words, was the bottom of every rhetor's slippery slope, the magnum absurdum of his reductio. (Yes, that's chintz Latin. I'm lazy tonight.)

Porlock Jr., the above may address your question as well, which I did poorly in my response. Haeckel not so much, but Spencer was a force in American social thought and policy in the Gilded Age, only not in the way you'd suppose. As I already noted, Spencer was a Lamarckian, so to call his thought Darwinian is a misnomer, but furthermore, his ethics leaned to the communitarian (as did Wallace's, and Huxley's, and pretty much everyone not named "William Graham Sumner"). You two have inspired me to write a little something something on this, so expect it as soon as the Absent, er, Adam Roberts event concludes.

(Oh, and Ray: I realize that one thing your Adams quotation points to is the groundwork thinkers had laid before Hofstadter built his house. It's there, certainly, but not nearly so saliently as it would be post-Hofstadter.)