Scandal

The idea of scandal and how society responds to scandal has changed a great deal in the past few decades. Up until the sixties, people exerted a great deal of effort to prevent anything from becoming public. The worst thing imaginable in a 19th century novel, would be for people to find out and talk about whatever affair or liaison was driving the plot. No one must know, if they do know, they must be persuaded not to speak of the matter under any circumstances. What actually happened is almost beside the point, what really scares the characters is that others might find out and talk. This will cause scandal, and they will be ruined. I believe that, before the sixties, this would have been the prevailing view. It did not so much matter what happened, what mattered was whether people knew and spoke about the matter... If they did, one was ruined, if not, the problem did not actually exist.

Various large organizations, most notably the Catholic Church, did not make this transition gracefully. Also one finds a moment in most government cover-ups and scandals where people seem to believe that they are operating under the old rules. If only they can stop people from talking, then there will actually not be a problem - that is, it's not the illegal or scandalous activity that's the problem, the problem is that people are talking about it.

With the modern outlook being so clear, and apparently self-evident: that everything must be immediately made public, it's not the scandal that causes the damage, it's the cover-up... it is difficult to remember or even conceive that people ever thought differently. Why would they have been so determined to keep people from speaking about scandals and foibles publicly, but not so very concerned with stopping the activities themselves? I wondered for a few moments before an idea occurred to me - they are trying to keep conflict inside the society to an absolute minimum. One might think of society as a collection of individuals making their own individual choices, some of these choices perhaps not the best. This idea is not cohesive enough if the society believes itself under threat, however. Then it must enforce a social order, and act to stamp out conflict, and situations which threaten to cause conflict.

I lived in Seattle for several years and jogged through an older part of town. I noticed that the large, attractive older homes had no driveways, they did, however, have alleys in the back. Why would this be? I suddenly realized that respectable people would enter and be received in special rooms, kept presentable just for this purpose, while workmen, servants and others less respectable would enter through the alley. Garbage, and other things not to be mentioned, will be remove through the alley. If the master of the house has been indulging in a late night revelry at the brothels down in Pioneer square, perhaps he will enter through the back, so as not to disrupt the harmonious and respectable facade which fronts the street. There is no problem with him going to the brothels, as long as it does not disrupt the facade of the house, which the family has painstakingly constructed to present to the world. In this society, essentially everyone would know which door was the correct door for them to enter. They would keep themselves sorted according to respectability, and their less agreeable aspects would remain behind a screen in the alley.

The collision between the modern outlook and this older world would be undermining to both. The older world is a world in which people keep themselves sorted by social standing automatically, and in which all manner of actions can be tolerated so long as they stay behind a socially contrived screen. This older world puts great energy into indoctrinating social values so that people will automatically sort themselves by class, and so avoid confrontation. It places contrived social screens around all manner of behavior, at least for men, and so enables tolerating this behavior and avoids conflict. This society goes to great lengths to maintain a facade of harmony and order, whether this exists in reality or not. Was this older society under some sort of threat? Something which required it to repress internal conflicts in order to direct all its energies toward external difficulties? It does not seem to be this so much from what knowledge of history I possess. This older society seems to need to mobilize a great part of its resources and day to day social interactions in order to maintain its structure, its hierarchy of classes and genders, groups of higher and lower status, groups of outsiders and insiders. It seems archaic, blind and rigid, something to be thrown off at the soonest possible occasion. Yet the modern outlook has its strange blind spots as well, strange artifacts of vision like marketing and branding, the narrative, (a figure of modern speech which might uncharitably be called a lie), and many other strange artifacts obscuring clear sight. Just for an example, consider child care. Because people are willing to provide this service for free, at least for their own children, the market sees this as having a very low, or possibly no real value. People who try to sell this service are in competition with people providing it for free - it must not be very valuable... But if it is not done with at least some attention and care, you will end up with a population which is essentially unemployable. This is certainly of considerable economic value, but the market, by its very design, cannot price this service correctly. Modern society has perhaps dispensed with a considerable part of the social control and social enforcement, and replaced it with people who are trained to respond to market forces. When faced with difficulties, people are told that they need to consider their personal brand and make sure that they advertise and promote it in ways the market finds agreeable. A strange sort of social pressure this...