When Bill Cosby was released from jail a few weeks ago, there was no celebration. After all, Cosby had not been exonerated; he had just beaten the wrap even though he had spent three years in jail for a tainted conviction for having plied women with drugs so as to have sex with them. No talking head that I heard of said that there had been a grave injustice just a few years ago when the judicial process had outrun itself, quick to convict on unsound grounds, people now returning to due process when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decided that the prior district attorney had said that Cosby would not be prosecuted again after a hung jury in his first trial if Cosby told of having given drugs so that plaintiffs could then pursue a civil suit because a second criminal trial would also not be convicted, but the next DA decided to prosecute anyway, such was the frenzy for convicting sexual offenders, and then used that same damaging evidence against Cosby. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court had righted matters by saying that Cosby was convicted of double jeopardy and forced to testify against himself. And so the conviction was voided and Cosby set free. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court did not even have to reach the second issue that the second trial used too many witnesses of a pattern of Cosby doing a similar thing, that Cosby was apparently convicted of a slew of victims rather than the one for which he was actually indicted. But rather than a sense that Cosby had been convicted because there was a period of outrage by Feminists that an accusation was always to be believed, there were few comments. After all, Cosby got off on what was considered a technicality though civil libertarians might say that was a very serious matter in that due process of law was a fundamental part of all western societies.
The sociologist Roland Wulbert, so as to explain how Feminists can deal with the contradiction between due process and Feminist advocacy, both of which they presumeably advocate, says that the cognitive dissonance is resolved by having two different meanings for due process, two concepts even if the same words are evoked to describe them. First of all, there is due process which is universally applicable as the necessary process whereby people are tried or convicted for crimes they have each in particular made rather than a law that applies to categories of people. Due process, I could argue, is a notion as old as the idea that judicial process is rational or fair in that without it justice is arbitrary, slaves punished interchangeably or for crimes committed and convicted only for thought crimes, an intention, perhaps of doing something bad. Certainly, due process is enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment as a way to prevent ex-slaves from being hounded by a reign of terror. The usual examples of this fundamental legal principle are applied to Communists or believers in unpopular issues, such as Socialism. Most people, including almost all Feminists, I would suspect, uphold due process. But then there is a second meaning for the phrase. It provides an exception to due process, which would seem to be a category that has no legitimate exception. Lynchers, for example, violate due process, but people may feel so strongly they do not care. With Feminism, however, there is no need to note that there is an exception to due process. It just doesn’t exist as a category. Women are so singular in having been abused sexually that there is no reason to engage in a judicial process, just to respond to the outrage by punishing people, whether Al Franken or Charlie Rose or various other celebrities, and including gay men who are also accused, such as James Levine or Kevin Spacey. Due process has the disadvantage of being protracted but the new idea among Feminists is that due process isn’t even necessary. All that is necessary, perhaps, is having a law firm’s investigation of an accusation when the law firm is in the employer of the university or the corporation, and so not impartial. The Feminist imagination is preoccupied with vengeance rather than the due process necessary, supposedly, for justice. The new dispensation is free floating, fully unto itself, and so is not considered either due process or the abandonment of it and, in fact, invoking due process in the first meaning seems to be a surprise in that people are doing a different thing, whether you consider it substantive justice or vengeance or something else. There is no cognitive dissonance between due process and its absence because they seem to have nothing to do with one another.
This radical thing, of replacing one concept with another so that the first one is not even available for thought, can be considered cultural in that a new time and place occurs where people, collectively have no awareness of the prior condition. We think of such things as frenzies, such as the Salem Witch trials, or the anti-red menace after the First World War, but it doesn’t have to appear as irrational or short. It follows its own principles of how to decide things, such as how to deal with American Indians or the Jews in Spain, the Catholics less concerned with converting Jews than killing them, just as those who killed the Albagensians were not very concerned about having trials. It is a low priority even if there is such a thing as a trial or include procedures within a trial whereby tortured people are forced to confess. These practices seem like parodies of justice. These procedures are not really to be taken seriously even if some inquisitors appear to be jurists.
Take heed that, for Wulbert, culture is not only concerned with long term and difficult to change sets of beliefs and customs,as when we think of Ancient China or pre-literate Polynesia as having cultures. Rather, it includes things that spring up quickly or with few precursors when people see a new way of thinking about some aspect of life and that new vision comes to engross a population as the natural and inevitable way to understand or to do things. So Impressionism came at a moment however much it came together. The same was the experimentalist impulse of the Modernists such as Kafka and Joyce and Picasso. The same can be said of gay marriage which very quickly spread around Latin America and Europe right after the United States was the first to allow gay marriage in 2017. Not too much a whike ago, being gay was considered disgusting and no sociey had ever allowed gay marriage. But now even theologians who still disapprove no longer say that gays are disgusting; it is just that the Bible prohibits it. Like frenzies, social movements can also move fast.
Here is another example of the current situation with regards to a culture. Last week, Joy Reid on MSNBC said that white students should not be sheltered from the bad ways blacks were treated by whites in slavery or under Jim Crow even if it hurt the feelings of white people now that they were members of a tainted group. That was just tough. Young people had to learn the hard truths of the past, however painful learning those truths were. But I am reminded that Black commentators of a decade ago were saying that Black students were exposed to issues that the Black students might feel it sensitive to deal with, such as the extent of their prior degradation. Students should be warned by instructors that difficult discussions were ahead and students might be excused from attending class. Black students then could get a pass but white students today do not. Was that simply racial favoritism, each group just identifying with the feelings of the students of one’s own group? I think not because each side is expostulating a general principle for how to deal with sensitive subjects. One principle is to be kind to feelings which are contentious and the other is to speak the truth however much it may hurt. That is an ethical principle about which people in the past ten years have changed, however much the principle, whichever one it is, seems permanent rather than simply a passing custom.
How would I bring to bear what would seem to be this contradiction? People might say that circumstances had changed or that people had evolved in that time, now thinking it is more humane to tell the unvarnished truth rather than to coddle students, that last just a phase of Black assimilation into the ranks of college students and so allowances having needed to be made. Wulbert thinks otherwise. Either group would have been nonplussed at the prospect of the alternative view. It was just natural, a matter of common sense, to observe that students should be soft pedalled or else given the truth raw. The alternative would seem bizarre and wonder what it was you were talking about when a visitor from the space time continuum had mentioned how things had changed, Marty McFly did not believe in the future in “Back in the Future” that Ronald Reagan had been elected President. Usages are like facts. You can’t believe that they are other than what they are.
But people are clever in that some of them are aware that other people are in a bubble and so unaware of comparisons between past and present, though what remains unresolved is how people are elevated above the cultural moments people inhabit and so notice those cultural limitations. Is it intelligence or education or innate insight which allows people to see the present as relativistic? I think it is education in that comparing histories and cultures makes you capable of noticing even a Wulbert moment when events seem forever fixed, whether that means taking up leisure suits in the Seventies as attractive or regarding Trump as a beacon whereby to overturn all those establishment types or, at the present moment, thinking that politicians are being politicians when they are opposed to anything, as is the case with Mitch McConnell, rather than having a different policy, some policy, however lame that deficit financing or states rights might be.
Conservatives, for the moment, might burst the bubble of women and political correctness, whatever that might be, by resorting to the following rhetoric or reasons. They identify “identity politics'' as the culprit. Blacks and women are deficient in their social causes, so it is said, in that the two groups are overly critical of their social situations and that members of each of them treat their history as only in terms of oppression that is gradually overcome and prejudices and discrimination that are current, and wanting special privileges so that each of them can achieve a putative equality when restrictions on those groups are, by this moment, relatively rare and not especially cumbersome, such as happened recently with Texas and Georgia voting registration laws. A lot of whining and complaining so as to puff themselves up. It might seem strange that these two groups would find themselves two of a kind in that the genders are recognized in every preliterate society while ethnicity has other though longstanding roots, ethnic groups encountering one another since in ancient times when people crossed the Alps to trade goods, or even more recently when Abraham moved his family from Ur to Canaan, but such is the case, the two groups cooperating and colliding ever since Seneca Falls when women’s rights were seen as not to be distracted by abolitionism. But the rhetoric of the two groups are today similar and those who want to burst the bubble do so by saying the groups are out to self-aggrandizement rather than to some prospect of equality between all groups.
I demur by saying that in fact there are differential equalities between women and men and Blacks and whites. Women do not have economic remuneration for childcare, just work that is paid for by husbands or by women earning money for out of home work, though Biden is trying to do some of that by increasing benefits for children. And Black people have lower wages and Black women have smaller birth weights for their children than do white women do, and that can result in disadvantages and advantages that continue through childhood and adulthood. These are structural problems rather than matters of either discrimination or prejudice. The life chances are worse for women and Blacks whatever are their natural endowments. But Conservatives are always out to blame people and so either Black people are to be faulted for not working hard enough or being in gang culture and women are to be blamed for their never ending temptation of Adam.
Blaming, then, can burst a bubble but it is a subculture that creates a new bubble in that blame seems an inevitable, universal, natural thing to do, something unavoidable, It is the way to do things and it would never occur that some people might be so bizarre as to get rid of blame, to see people as blameless and instead see people as being whatever it is they are, mostly the result of their circumstances and choices more or less reasonable, which is the way that sociologists of the mid Twentieth Century saw as their dispensation. People have moved beyond that moment, this cultural understanding, not so much by answering moral neutrality in social science as by abandoning it for arguments of advocacy, only economics insisting that there is scientific neutrality whereby most serious economists, Conservative and Liberal, can agree, however much there are nuances which put the two groups apart. The Wulbert view of culture, however, is that bubbles spring up and will then, in a time, burst, to be replaced by new bubbles in which people will enclose themselves, take a fancy for whatever reasons and so the prospect of scientific neutrality is a will o'the wisp, something that came and went, however much Wulbert (and myself) are familiar with that cultural bubble and we are fond of that fancy.