As I often do in blogging, I kind of wove together several different ideas or points and hoped there was a theme to connect them.

The theme might be as simple as “from tiny acorns mighty oaks grow”–and that often people resist seeing what an acorn might grow into, arguing that it’s such a tiny thing, we mustn’t overestimate it, don’t fall for a slippery slope argument. At least sometimes we should take seriously warnings that what appear to be isolated events have the potential to accumulate into a trend or some other form of emergent structure, and that once they do, the consequences could be serious.

I think there’s a global crisis of confidence in the ability of the nation-state to deliver what it claims to deliver to its citizens (security, prosperity, some degree of equity or fairness, some feeling of unity or belonging, etc.) that’s largely based on the real accumulation of numerous small disappointments and failures.

Similarly, I would argue that technocrats and other establishment figures in almost all mainstream political parties have failed to deliver the outcomes that they claim ought to follow from the crafting of policy or institutional procedure.

That suspicion of power and of political elites is based on some genuine truth.

Etc. The point would be, since I would still hold out a lot of hope for liberal democracy in some form, for the nation-state in some form, for the belief that knowledge and expertise can lead to a better world, and so on, that people who feel similarly cannot rebuild what they have lost incrementally without first acknowledging that there’s a great deal of truth that fueled that incremental but accelerating change. That even when that process arrives at something that’s frankly deranged or untrue, it’s not good enough to stand pat on that observation (that something is frankly deranged or untrue). It’s fine to say Trump is grossly irresponsible, dangerous and ugly when he accused Obama of wiretapping him, but we have to understand that the charge rattles around and sticks not merely because there is a sort of will-to-untruth on the far right but because we live at the other end of a relentless incremental stream of revelations about the political abuse of surveillance powers, about the careless misuse or overuse of signals interception, about the unreliability and untrustworthiness of claims about oversight, and so on. To try and get us back to where we only hear responsible, carefully evidenced accusations of this kind in our culture at large takes more than just scornfully dismissing Trump. It takes acknowledgement of why the concept of wiretapping and surveillance is so much with us, in us.

I didn’t follow much of this. Are you saying that you predicted an upsetting of the international political order, were ignored (or scorned), and then were vindicated by recent events?

Are you saying that voters in various nations have, in reaction to recent high-profile scandals, transitioned from being overly trustful-of-government to being overly mistrustful-of-government?

Are you saying that establishment Democrats harmed the interest of their party by being too corrupt recently?

Are you saying that Trump’s election was only possible because large portions of voters held false beliefs, or weren’t able to evaluate basic claims of fact?

Is this post intended as a philosophical treatment of the concept of “trust” and a call for readers to not assume the worst of others?

But even if I thought that /most/ had molested children, I don’t have the luxury of removing myself from the world. So I accept that I will work with, and maybe even be friends with, and maybe even fall in love with, people who have done horrible things.

I mean, I insist on evidence because evidence changes my level of certainty, which I require at various levels to be comfortable with doing or not doing various things.

I mean, after the Holocaust, how do you live as a person in Germany? After slavery, how do you live in the United States? I think that maybe I have a much darker view of the world than you? But we live half our lives in the dark, so what if it is full of horror? Then I will live with that too, even while I try to make my own light.

I mean, trust is a choice because without trust I can do nothing, will be nothing. Whatever the risk, it is worth it to maintain our best hope of building meaningful lives. Against all evidence, I reject the nihilism of absolute distrust. My government murders children, what of it? I need a government and this is the one I have, I must learn how to make it the best that it can be. That has to be enough because it’s all I have.

But think even on this side of that change-over: you (and I) still think, I hope, that most teachers and priests and celebrities don’t do anything like this. But that’s where it gets hard: why do we trust in anyone? Or insist on evidence about anything? We know how the demand for evidence has been misused to stall, defer, delay, excuse, diminish, after all. But we do still insist, or at least I know I do: most people are trustworthy, etc.–#notallmen. So we have to find a way to talk in a wider context about why we do or should trust some people, in a way that lets trust grow without insisting that the gold standard for trust is sainthood, performing incessantly.

You and I think similarly about realism and so to us that was obviously a lunatic accusation. And I think we are right to think that everyone should in some sense be using some of the same rough yardsticks for judging what’s realistic.

My point would simply that in a context in which it feels, in a somewhat feverish way, as if many previously respected institutions and individuals were in fact involved in some form of sexual misconduct, that it is easier for some people to give in to more unreal, conspiracy-laden accusations. And not the least because in many of those past accusations, there were people dismissing their credibility on grounds of realism and evidence as well.

I think generational awareness is an important part of the story, too–as well as relative worldliness. For the oldest Americans, they may with some justice really feel as if the world used to be purer etc. I think we all know that’s not the case–e.g., that what Catholic priests were doing in 1970 they likely were doing in 1950; the same for powerful men and celebrities. But the degree to which we know and that knowledge is part of a public transcript are different.

I think here my youth is showing. I was still in high school when the Boston Globe began reporting on the cover-up of abuses in the Catholic Church so I think of the realization that every institution and every public figure has the potential to commit every abuse as a basic part of growing up, akin to realizing that I myself am capable of evil and that my parents are likewise merely human.

And I mean, in the case of the pizza pedophilia ring, it doesn’t make sense. I can believe that Clinton or Podesta has serially molested children, but then the story should pattern match other serial pedophiles. Which probably means some sort of school child volunteer program or children of family friends or staffers. The fact that the conspiracy theory doesn’t match the way that these crimes are actually committed when they are committed makes me skeptical of the claim that some sort of realism is central to their believability?

Honestly? The accumulating weight of evidence. Meaning, yes, there’s still a moral panic element even now–that’s what the ‘fake news’, fervid right-wing conspiracy thinking part of this all is. But also at this point compared to various moments in the 20th Century past, we just have to face it: power and sexual misconduct just really are somewhat systematically linked. I think the successive revelations about the Catholic Church, various schools, etc., plus the serial conduct of people like Cosby and Savile, makes this somewhat different.

The historian in me would insist that we not casually thread more recent examples together with 18th C. France, the blood libel, etc.–that moral panics may have some degree of commonality or recurrence but also that the past is another country–other publics, other structures for culture and knowledge to circulate, etc., matter a good deal.

I guess I’m left wondering how this is a new thing. Lots of historical parallels come to mind, from the Satanic child abuse panic of the ’80s to 18th century France to the blood libel. What distinguishes this particular instance from the larger pattern?