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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Beneath the gawking, the online reaction to the Spitzer and Paterson revelations shows that Americans are wary of passing judgment on private sins.
By Gary Kamiya
Read more: Bill Clinton, France, Internet, Sex, Media, Gary Kamiya, Opinion, Morality
Reuters images
Former President Bill Clinton in March 1999, left; former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer in March 2008.
April 1, 2008 | America seems to be slowly but surely weaning itself from its addiction to shrill moral judgments. Only 10 years ago, former President Bill Clinton was almost removed from office because he fooled around with a White House intern. Ten years before that, Douglas Ginsburg lost his shot at the Supreme Court because he admitted he had smoked marijuana. But when New York Gov. David Paterson recently copped to having had extramarital affairs and doing cocaine, the public reaction was a collective yawn. Admittedly, Paterson chose the best possible time to make his public confession: after the Eliot Spitzer train wreck, he probably could have revealed that he had dabbled in necrophilia while high on smack and gotten away with it. But still, Paterson's get-out-of-jail-free card would have been inconceivable just a few years ago.
We'll probably never have state funerals in which the wife and mistress of the late president stand side by side at the grave, as they do in France, but the hand that once held American sinners in its angry grasp has weakened notably.
There are many reasons for the gradual erosion of American Puritanism. Consumer capitalism, which uses sex to sell everything, has loosened the old restraints. So has ubiquitous pornography, now a multibillion-dollar industry. The sheer number of sex scandals, and their instant dissemination in an age of 24/7 media saturation, has lessened their shock value and their stigma. Conservatives, by instinct, ideology and upbringing the most fervent believers in a strict code of moral conduct, are no more immune to the culture they live in than anyone else. Moreover, they have had to come to terms with the adultery and/or drug use of many of their heroes, and their need to accommodate or excuse this behavior has let the hot air out of their outrage balloon. Even right-wing icons like Rush Limbaugh have been forced to become everybody-does-it relativists. When George W. Bush, icon of the moralistic right, all but admitted he smoked dope and did a few lines in his "young and foolish" days, he probably did more to end America's drug hysteria than a thousand policy papers.
The Internet, too, has undermined American Puritanism. This may seem counterintuitive: After all, the Internet has greatly exacerbated our society's sensationalist, voyeurist and exhibitionist tendencies. The smallest public sin is instantly discussed by millions of people. But this mass orgy of ogling and gossiping conceals the fact that Americans are no longer as judgmental as they once were. Indeed, it may even be part of the reason they aren't. And because the Internet functions as a giant national feedback loop, in which the opinions of countless people are thrown out into the world and then recirculated through the body politic, changes in the Internet zeitgeist become self-reinforcing.
The majority of Internet posters and bloggers are simply not particularly exercised about the flesh-is-weak sins committed by public figures. The coverup is worse than the crime: Hypocrisy and lying are seen as hanging crimes, but not adultery or recreational drug use. That's why Spitzer went down while Paterson skated. Hardcore moralists, those who issue unqualified, black-and-white condemnations of personal foibles, are greatly outnumbered online. I don't have any empirical evidence of this, but judging from years of reading readers' letters, discussion threads and blogs, it seems true to me.
Online discussions and posts are notoriously judgmental, argumentative and ad hominem, to be sure. But they tend not to be based on traditional notions of "sin." The number of posters and bloggers who flatly condemn public figures, or even private ones, simply for having engaged in sexual indiscretions or using recreational drugs is relatively low. And that holds true even on right-wing sites like Free Republic.
Political differences, not a belief in absolute right and wrong, are what drive ad hominem online attacks on public figures. Liberal bloggers rage against Newt Gingrich for pursuing a divorce while his wife was in the hospital with cancer, conservative bloggers cackle with glee over the fall of Eliot Spitzer, but the spleen of both is usually driven more by partisanship than a transcendental moral code.
The true home of unabashed moralizing isn't the Internet but the "elite" media -- the pundits and gatekeepers. In 2003, the conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote that "anybody who has several sexual partners in a year is committing spiritual suicide" (effectively announcing, as New York magazine media critic Michael Wolff pointed out, "the metaphysical demise of, one might guess, a good percentage of Times readers as well as the city itself"). But down where the unwashed masses mix it up, these lofty utterances are as rare as a pince-nez in a barroom.
