Sometimes I read tweets or hear remarks from people who say they have writer's block -- that they want to write but can't think what to write about. This always makes me giggle, because I have the opposite problem -- far too much to write about. Even after getting past the narcissistic mirror-tales of my own life, which in the past has been exciting, there is so much to think about, more now and more urgently than ever before.
Today I'm buzzing inside with two stories. One will be a long-term focus, I think for the rest of my life. The other is -- I hope -- transient, at least comparatively. I'll write separate posts because when I cram them together it gets everyone confused.
The shorter thought is about trying to retrieve the work of Norval Morris, for whom I typed and made coffee at the U of Chicago Law school in '81-82. He was a particularly distinguished and unique professor and I amused and bemused him in our small interactions. One day he gave me careful instructions about using a Chemex coffeemaker and the next he shook his head when I went to sit down in the ultlramodern chair in his office and fell on the floor instead.
His specialty was handing the treatment of convicted prisoners, with special focus on those who suffered from insanity. I wish he were still living to help us think about what to do with Trump if he should be dethroned but try to evade justice by pleading insanity. Not just the narcissistic power disorder that has made him what he is, but the organic failure to function he inherited from father. What justice is there?
I have two books by Morris. One is "Madness and the Criminal Law" (1982) and the other is "The Brothel Boy and Other Parables of the Law" (1992). They are not law-based but case-based. He hit upon the hoax/strategy/punking idea of pretending to be George Orwell, a much-admired writer who was in real life a police magistrate in the Asian SE pressed into deciding impossible cases. Morris' writing was hard thinking in intelligent penetrating style, meant to bump students out of the assumptions they so often made about the Other.
The joke was that Morris was such a good writer and the cases were so intriguing that much of the media thought there really was a new book discovered in the archives of Orwell. Morris had to get a friend to "reveal" that he'd made the whole thing up. He was such an irreproachable and highly placed person that no one at that time accused him of hoax. Now they might. Now even the highly "respected" are considered an Other capable of rot. I can't think of another scholar with enough impressive weight and insight for problems like ours.
I see two great dilemmas of our times as being cultural dyads, key debates. Ordinarily I try to escape from binaries because they tend to lock up and turn to force when they ought to be conversations. One of these is the tension between the individual and the whole society, which anyway refuses to stick together into something that could be addressed. Individuals present a similar problem by being so solipsistic that they can't constructively join with others for a common goal. Contrasting cultures develop internally or come from other places to give us mutually exclusive commands. "Cover your hair" versus "do not cover your hair."
The other big difficulty is that our educated elites have concentrated on being rational, excluding all emotion as being "animal." Surprisingly, it turns out that "rationally" it is provable that emotion is part of everything and that we ARE animal. As an insult, it's childish, uninformed. But those benighted elites, mostly white male Ivy-bedecked big shots, can't give up the pretense of rationality.
Searching for rationality in a terrifying time, these people more than some others have been vulnerable to the idea that money is an index of the meritocracy. If one has a lot of money, one is "supreme" even the face of a weepy defense of beer-drunkenness. No one argues with this. At least not effectively enough to disbar such a person from being a lawyer, much less on a high court. The only people to object are women and they don't count for anything.
"The Brothel Boy" includes the earlier "Madness" stories. It is not about male sexwork but about a mentally limited boy who lived as a servant in a brothel and caused a death. It comes up against an argument that has revived among us: should capital punishment ever be imposed? What is the role of popular opinion in who, when and how death should be imposed? (Was Epstein's death pre-emptive or imposed?) The point of the stories is that they are irresolvable. Does it matter?
One of the problems with rationality is that it often asks for a definitive answer when there is none. One of the problems with money is that the rackets of symbolism and reputation make it possible for Trump to be seen as a billionaire when he is no such thing. So how can we ever reach a rational conclusion? It's got to be emotional in large part and since he knows that, is a master of pop emotion, his defenses are strong.
Our idea of justice is confused with the Rule of Law, which asks for uniformity. The same punishment for the same offense without capricious adjustments. But one of the deep arguments between law and justice is that circumstances are not the same. Every case is different. In our times the cases are different because the world is so changed by the Internet, by the scarcity of resources, and by new equations of who is important. These books are tight and time-consuming, but what could be more imporant to help find the way forward?
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