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Musings of a Third-Generation Wagon Circler
Writing here at Ricochet last week, @KateBraestrup expressed her opinion that “even without the sixfold imprimatur of the FBI, it would be virtually impossible to make a circle of wagons tight enough to conceal the kind of lurid behavior that Kavanaugh has been accused of.” She continued: “It’s not that it doesn’t exist; rather, when it exists, people know about it. Louche, lascivious or predatory men (alcoholic or otherwise) over time become well-known for being so.” While I’m relieved Kavanaugh has been confirmed, and I dreaded the precedent that would have been set if he had not have been, I can’t agree that men’s wagon circles are virtually never this tight. I know because I’m part of more than one man’s wagon circle, as was my mother, and her mother before her. Three generations of conservative American women, all three with little inclination to laugh off predatory behavior as just “boys being boys” — and all three with just as little inclination to name and shame men for having stories like those alleged about Kavanaugh in their past.
Men become notorious for sexual predation by persisting in it for long periods of time, especially if they become shameless about it. One reason we caution youth to postpone sex is because immature sexual misadventures are often exploitative. As Mark Regnerus has documented in his books Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying and Forbidden Fruit: Sex & Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers, boys usually find it considerably easier than girls do to self-servingly and callously rationalize their “conquests,” even when they’ve had the moral formation to know better. Thank God that boys who should know better and don’t often mature into men who know better and do! Thank God that not everyone who has committed a sexual wrong in his past persists in that sort of misbehavior.
The most immediate reason to disclose someone’s predatory reputation is to warn others of an ongoing threat. Given this, when someone poses no ongoing threat, why not let bygones be bygones? This doesn’t mean rationalizing past wrongs as never having been wrong to begin with. Nor does it mean appealing to the preposterous notion of a “moral bank account” (if such bank accounts really existed, we could with a clear conscience “financially plan” monstrous depravity by saving up enough “moral credit”). Instead, it means acknowledging that justice isn’t served by long delay, the same moral logic which imposes a statute of limitations on reporting many crimes. Wrongs too great to lapse into bygones are wrongs great enough to warn others about promptly, while lesser wrongs may be forgotten about over time.
***
I was once pinned down and groped. Not at a party, but while lending someone a book. While I’m confident the boy who did it didn’t mean to bully me, I’d be wronging myself if I tried to rationalize his conduct toward me as anything other than wrong. Wrong, but how wrong? Wrongful enough to press charges? I decided no. Instead, I filed an informational report with campus police, saying I’d testify if he made such a habit of such behavior that others complained. Since I was never called upon to testify, to the best of my knowledge, this fellow didn’t make a habit of it. He had done wrong, but not enough wrong to be labeled a predator. Not enough wrong to have his promising prospects wrecked over it. I’ll never forget this boy’s first name, a name which I’ve found awkward ever since. But I don’t remember his last name anymore. Nor would I wish to. That someone had wronged me was no huge secret, but who that someone was I kept between myself and the kindly officer who assured me my groper’s name would never be publicized based on my report alone. Having formed a one-woman wagon circle around this fellow, I’m fairly confident this circle will remain tight indefinitely. The other, larger wagon circles I’m part of, I’m less sure about. I suppose someone could eventually break ranks. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
Unlike my mother and grandmother, none of the men (or women) whose secrets I’ve kept were politicians — or judges — or at least not while I knew them. Maybe some are now. Youth can be cruel, and as soon as youth becomes sexually aware, sexual bullying can and sometimes will happen. I doubt it’s unusual for bullying, not romance, to be the first sexually-charged experience many youngsters have (perhaps the only experience some youngsters have for quite some time if they’re otherwise innocent). The tightest wagon circles I’m part of date back to my and my attackers’ youth. They’re tight because it’s just them and me, and because everyone involved realizes everyone was immature when it happened. Which makes none of what happened right just hopefully not indicative of my attackers’ eventual maturity.
Still, I’m part of some wider wagon circles around more mature men. As a wagon circle widens, the members of that circle are less likely to know the whole story, which is its own reason for not breaking the circle: Is it fair to break the circle by naming names when you’re not certain whether you know the whole story or whether it’s really your story to tell? I haven’t acted as if it is and neither has my mother or grandmother. Regarding wagon circles around political men, I know little more than that both Ma and Grandma knew of some politicians’ and legal eagles’ scandals and that neither woman was inclined to say too much or judge too harshly. If my dear ancestresses told me any more, they’d risk breaking the circle, after all.
***
While I’m profoundly relieved at Kavanaugh’s confirmation, I doubt I’ll ever believe Kavanaugh’s protestations of injured innocence quite as much as good conservative women are apparently expected to.
Oh, I think Kavanaugh’s more likely than not innocent of the worst sexual misbehavior attributed to him, and I believe he should get the benefit of the doubt in any case, especially as time’s passage has blurred the traces of what really happened. A conservative man of my acquaintance estimated there’s a 10% chance the incident Ford described with Kavanaugh happened exactly as she said it did, and a 5% chance Ford’s story was wholly invented. That is, he estimated there was about an 85% chance that some incident had happened to Ford in her teens, perhaps an incident involving Kavanaugh, but that calling it attempted rape wasn’t justified, and it wasn’t something which should be held against Kavanaugh so many years after the fact. His estimations, particularly the 10% figure, seem roughly in the ballpark to me.
Note that his estimates make it twice as likely that Kavanaugh really did what Ford said than that Ford invented her story from nothing. Twice as likely may seem outrageously unfair to Kavanaugh until you remember that twice 5% is still only 10%, and a 10% chance that a man may have done something long ago in his youth does not tell us who he is now.
10% is an uncomfortable number, a magnitude that’s difficult to moralize either way, and people crave morals for their stories. If Kavanaugh were a teenager now, and he did have a 10% chance of doing what Ford accused him of, that chance would be uncomfortably high — especially for a well-reared, religiously observant teen who got into Yale and really should have known better. Nobody should be comfortable with a world where teens ostensibly receiving good moral formation have a one-in-ten shot of becoming the kind of sexual bully Ford described. And nobody should be comfortable with a world where a man can be ruined by a 10% chance he may have done wrong long ago.
***
I’ve been part of too many wagon circles, witnessed too much youthful bullying and partying in elite environments, to believe it’s nearly impossible for youngsters with the right credentials to successfully leave a sordid past behind them, even in the days of #MeToo. Human nature just doesn’t change that much from generation to generation, and one of conservatives’ humdrum duties is to keep pointing out the persistent homely truths — that, whether it’s fair or not, one reason people desire success is because it does insulate them from the downsides of their vices, women really are more susceptible than men to the risks of intoxication and sexual compromise, and so on. I see no reason for conservatives to defend excuses like “they threw themselves at him” or “they let you do it” (one suspects for varying definitions of “throw” and “let”) from the skepticism such excuses have always deserved. Still, despite today’s #BelieveAllVictims rhetoric, the flesh-and-blood people I know, even the leftists, aren’t so simplistic as to confuse skepticism of innocence with certainty of guilt.
I’ve written before that the benefit of the doubt is more than charitable mental hygiene. It’s also a powerful social statement. Who gets it, and how much, matters. Where there’s skepticism of innocence, but not certainty of guilt, there’s also doubt — hence benefit of the doubt. Kavanaugh gets the benefit of my doubt by a margin that’s not even close.
Still, I sense a social expectation that, if I really wanted to show solidarity with my own side, especially as a conservative woman, I’d widen that margin even further. The ballpark likelihoods my friend and I discussed are necessarily crude estimates surrounded by fairly wide confidence intervals. Given their width, why not settle on figures which would be more morally flattering to our side? Why not estimate that there’s, say, a less than 5% chance that Kavanaugh really did what Ford said, and, say, at least a 50% chance that Ford’s story is wholly fictional? Wouldn’t that be more comfortable?
Yes, it would be more comfortable, but it doesn’t jibe with all I know about the world. Moreover, it’s not necessary. Or rather, it’s not morally necessary. I concede the practicalities of political theater, where the benefit of the doubt each side gives the other is already so small, make it difficult to avoid exaggerating confidence in your own side’s rectitude to compensate for the benefit of the doubt your side should have gotten and didn’t. That I found Kavanaugh’s protestations of injured innocence over his youthful hijinks just a little too good to be true doesn’t undermine my belief that Kavanaugh would have been crucified had he admitted something which no grown man should be crucified for admitting: that he grew up and grew out of a youth involved in a party culture which is notorious for being less innocent than he portrayed it as. There’s not much reason to believe the man Kavanaugh is today is significantly less decent than advertised, even if his youth were less decent than political calculation could admit.
***
I was visiting family during Kavanaugh’s hearing, and one remark my mother made during the visit struck us younger members as particularly revealing: First, she said, Kavanaugh was innocent; but second, if he were guilty, so, too, she supposed, were countless other public servants, perhaps since time immemorial, and how could government exist at all if they were all disqualified from serving? Had her mother — my grandmother — still been alive, Grandma would probably have wondered the same thing. The family sat there, all of us knowing that each of us was part of wagon circles protecting others’ pasts, and all of us knowing my mother was part of some wagon circles leaving her hypothetical about public servants somewhat less than hypothetical.
To us youngsters, it was pretty clear that Mom’s estimation that men who go into public service are in general so likely to have indulged in such misbehavior that we couldn’t have government without them was an estimation increasing rather than decreasing the likelihood that Kavanaugh had once been a drunken sexual bully. Not increasing the likelihood to the point where Kavanaugh didn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt — even my more lefty relatives believed that how the accusations had been brought against Kavanaugh suggested a political hit job. But the claim that public servants can’t get away with it because they’re subject to so much scrutiny is rather at odds with the apparent fact that, over the years, so many public servants have.
***
Not all wagon circles will be broken, and that’s OK. Not all wagon circles deserve to be broken, either. A conservative sense of fair play does not try to right every single wrong, not because it rejoices in letting injustice stand, but because it recognizes that the pursuit of justice is subject to diminishing returns, especially as time passes. Civilization isn’t compatible with endless vendetta.
As the resurgence of scandal in the Catholic church illustrates, justice should smash right through some wagon circles, and those who demur over breaking those circles do the innocent no favors. It’s cruelly naive to keep others’ dirty secrets without asking whether those secrets are evidence either of an ongoing threat or of one of those few wrongs so great that the passage of time shouldn’t efface them. It’s also cruelly naive to blithely assume others will receive a fair hearing if whatever dirty secrets they do have are exposed, willy-nilly.
Wagon circles can be evidence of unjust power structures, but they aren’t always. Sometimes they result from trying to do others justice in a world of incomplete and contradictory information, a world where we know that people’s motives — not only strangers’ but our own — aren’t always pristine, and where information degrades over time. These circles do create an in-group on defense against an out-group, and in-group-out-group dynamics aren’t always healthy or pretty. There will always be powerful men undeservedly protected by their wagon circles, but there will also be others, powerful or not, who don’t deserve to have the circle of protection others have willingly extended smashed up in the name of a “justice” that smacks suspiciously of revenge.
Published in General
Oh, I definitely agree. It mattered very much to me that there weren’t women coming forward complaining about Kavanaugh in his late 20s and after.
Which, according to Mark Regnerus, a conservative sociologist whose expertise is sexual behavior among America’s youth, is actually pretty normal for teenage guys to do. Not that most teenage guys deserve to be accused of sex crimes or anything, but come on, we all know that plenty of behavior is predatory or exploitative without being a crime. Your basic non-criminal predatory behavior needn’t involve much more than being a really inconsiderate jerk, which many teenagers are — though girls, as Regnerus noted, tend to become other-regarding (that is, considerate) about sexual conduct considerably earlier than boys do (operative word being tend — I definitely know some girls are exceptions).
And there’s a sense in which any teen who’s not already famous in his teens is an ordinary, reasonably obscure person, even if he later climbs to the highest of heights. This, I think, is something a lot of ordinary people, no matter their political inclinations, recognize, which is one reason they do circle the wagons around others’ juvenile exploits, even if the others do later gain fame.
@midge
Am I understanding that by “circling the wagons” you mean that if the FBI had approached you about this that you would have said it didn’t happen?
I get the sense that she had gotten over the incident and moved on with her life until she recounted it to her therapist, who then convinced her that this nearly-forgotten childhood event was actually the root cause of whatever issues had prompted her to seek therapy in the first place.
Taking for granted that we’re giving our personal impressions here and that Kavanaugh was entitled to a presumption of innocence regardless of which party any of us subjectively believes: Kavanaugh’s remarks rang true to me. As someone who was a pretty nerdy and inexperienced guy throughout high school and college, I’d often laugh and go along with sexual jokes that I honestly didn’t get. In retrospect that was probably true for more of the guys in my social circle than I would have thought at the time. Call it the the law of the lowest common denominator maybe, but groups of men, really of whatever age tend to take on the tone of whoever’s the crudest or most prone to bragging. Kavanaugh’s description of being both proud and ashamed of his lack of experience on different levels also struck home to me as a catholic male. Each of us has an evolutionary lizard brain on some level than tends to keep track of the notches on one’s belt for the purpose of judging relative status. That’s true however dominant one’s superego might be or how firmly in line with one’s religious convictions on sexual behavior. If the guy who comes across on the pages of Kavanaugh’s yearbook is how a 17 year old kid wanted to be seen by his peers, that’s not necessarily any indication of who he was or wanted to be in real life.
All of which should support the point that in absence of any actual proof it really shouldn’t matter who we believe or how we estimate the probability of Kavanaugh’s innocence, not for political purposes and I tend to think not for the purpose of serious conversation. Without any firm factual guideposts Brett Kavanaugh the man is reduced to a blank canvas onto which we can project our own experience and attitudes; things that are unique to us and often of dubious value in trying to sort out the larger world.
Yes—I like your addition. You wouldn’t have to be “frail and foolish” to think you were about to be raped and/or accidentally smothered, but one might expect a middle-aged woman to come to some more nuanced understandings. Instead, we are expected to believe that she is exactly where she was 34 years ago.
Having endured sexual abuse that lasted years, I can say that even I’ve evolved a bit on how I see my parents’ behavior of the time. That’s normal.
@TallCon, in the essay, I recalled being pinned and groped by a guy on campus, and in the comments, I mentioned an incident (that had happened several years before) not too dissimilar from Rod Dreher’s.
The guy who groped me — I don’t remember his last name. If folks from the FBI called me about him, they’d have to tell me who he was first for me to even recognize him at this point. Probably, the only way even the FBI could figure out who he is after all this time would be to open the incident report I filed way back when with the campus police.
If I were asked, point-blank, by someone from the FBI, “We found this incident report. Do you remember filing it, and what do you have to say about it now?” I’d doubt I’d lie. Likely, I’d point out that, as upsetting as I found the experience, even at the time I wondered whether it wasn’t just a huge miscommunication, where he had mistaken me for a very different sort of girl from who I really was, rather than him deliberately trying to take advantage of me. I’d say that, absent other reports of similarly disturbing behavior, it was better to regard the incident as a freak misunderstanding, not something reflecting on his character.
The other incident, involving some bullies ganging up on me, while that was obviously quite deliberate, I only remember one of their names (a girl’s name, as it happens). I don’t see how the FBI could possibly know about that, since absolutely no record of it was made — my greatest fear once it had happened was that, if I even so much as described what had happened to a living soul, it would sound so much like a sick fantasy I was inventing to get others in trouble that I wouldn’t be believed.
Years after the fact, I mentioned the bullying incident to a wise old soul (a liberal, as it happens — still a wise old soul), and why I never said anything to anyone about it before then. The wise old soul said in all likelihood, I’d shown good judgment in not saying anything, since, given the social circumstances (these kids’ parents were “insiders” and mine weren’t), I would have likely been the one blamed for fabricating something really disgusting. And since the bullying involved only disgusting words and general contact, not intimate contact (I escaped before that was a possibility, if they would have ever dared to take the mockery that far, which I’m not sure they would have), the wrong was not great enough for me to be obligated to say anything. Really disgusting and did it boggle my mind that kids my age could say that stuff? Yeah. Did they menace me physically? Some. Did it freak me out? Sure — deeply. But did they inflict the sort of harm that couldn’t be left unsaid? No, no they didn’t. I mention it now to point out that this kind of behavior does exist, and we shouldn’t have to pretend it doesn’t. But it could be left unsaid, and I wouldn’t volunteer it.
One of the Roy Moore threads mentioned one of the things he was accused of, grabbing a woman’s head and trying to push it towards his crotch. The Ricochet objection was “But she wasn’t underage!” Is that where conservatism is at, or where it’s going? I thought that was the other side’s attitude.
Proof is evidence beyond a certain threshold, so that, even in the absence of proof, we may have evidence, some of it much weaker than others.
It seems to me there are tons of serious conversations to be had when people are willing to ballpark estimates about an event, and that being willing to guess a number and share it with others is a step toward overcoming the reduction of an event
For one thing, our first reaction to someone else giving a subjective probability estimate often is, “That estimate is biased!” — in which case, we usually have a pretty strong intuition of which direction we believe the bias of the estimate goes, as well as some intuition of the size of the bias.
We would consider someone who said, “I’m 99% certain Kavanaugh attempted to rape Ford,” considerably more biased against Kavanaugh than someone who said, “I don’t know one way or the other [which is 50% certainty] whether he tried to rape her.” How could we do that, unless we ourselves had some intuition of what an estimate of the event’s (and, in this case, also intent’s) likelihood should be in order to be relatively unbiased? And if we have that intuition, it yields the least-biased estimate we can come up with for now — which might still be biased, but in all likelihood less biased than if we hadn’t considered which estimates sounded really biased to us. Moreover, that estimate can be updated in light of new evidence — even evidence which falls short of proof.
If people are willing to compare ballpark figures, that gives them a shared scale on which to compare the impressions we all tend to form anyhow, which permits pooled knowledge, and at the very least some sense of how big a disagreement actually might be.
Being willing to put a number on it is a provisional, iterative process — the number you ballpark isn’t the be-all and end-all, but a place to start. It’s a process which hopefully makes bias more evident so that it can be overcome. While this isn’t a process which works for everyone — not everyone is used to thinking this way — it’s not useless. As for myself, I actually find estimating single numbers rather difficult. Instead, I tend to go for fairly wide confidence intervals. But if someone names their estimate, it may sound reasonable (within a wide confidence interval) or unreasonable to me.
Averaging out our biases does not lead us to the truth or anything close to it. That these kind of discussions tend to reveal a lot about ourselves and the people with whom we’re conversing but essentially nothing about the underlying factual question is exactly my point. That would all be fine and good if Brett Kavanaugh were a fictional character and our pronouncements on his guilt and innocence had no effect apart from the examination of bias, but in this case our preppy judge shaped Rorschach test is an actual human being named Brett Kavanaugh whose name gets dragged through the mud, and the judicial system along with it as we all go through our journeys of self-discovery in reaction to the allegations against him.
The idea isn’t to average biases, though. When people give us good reason to change our mind about something, it’s not an averaging process. Sometimes we change our mind a little, sometimes a lot, and there’s no reason to expect we’d end up at the average every time.
His name was already being dragged through the mud by people who weren’t us. That he’s an actual human being who deserved the benefit of the doubt (and fortunately got it, despite worries that he wouldn’t) isn’t anything anyone’s disputing here. Are we?
Who among us here can expect their opinion of Kavanaugh to influence Kavanaugh much? I can’t. We’re more likely to succeed in using moral reasoning about Kavanaugh to influence each other. Yes, that’s “using” a real, live human being to examine other ideas, but that’s neither unusual nor particularly immoral.
Unless you know someone who was in the room at the alleged party no one has anything to say that would constitute a good reason to change your mind. What others do have to offer are their experiences with people who are like Kavanaugh whether they be preppy judges or merely men but who are not Kavanaugh. Crowdsourced bias is still bias.
Individually, none of us, collectively all of us. The prisoners dilemma is a bad excuse for not modeling behavior that we’d like to see in the rest of society. Using Kavanaugh as a totem may not be immoral but it is maddening and unfair.
It is immoral.
On the contrary, that is actually 0% certainty. I’m not a math geek, but if someone says, “I have no idea” they are exhibiting 0% certainty. Likewise, if someone says, “I am 99% certain” about something of which they have no first-hand knowledge, they also have 0% actual certainty, despite their profession otherwise. The bias here isn’t against Kavanaugh, it’s an “Expertise Bias,” which is what smart people use to pretend that they know something that they don’t, or that they can solve with their wits something that they can’t. Being good at math as absolutely nothing to do with discovering the truth of a non-mathematical question.
Here’s some new baselines:
There is either a 0% chance that Kavanaugh did what he was accused of doing, or a 100% chance. There’s no sliding scale. There is also a 100% chance that the memories of everyone allegedly involved, including the alleged victim, are imperfect, and a 100% chance that all of us will never know what really went on and that we can’t be certain about anything.
True, and yet, all of us who watched the drama unfold could not help but speculate about what actually happened.
Not knowing one way or the other is consistent with assigning something a 50% likelihood. If you move from 50% in either direction, you express a belief that it is either more likely, or less likely, to have happened. Yes, this is a math geek thing.
Frequentists say this about historical events. And frequentists are wrong. It’s perfectly cogent to say, based on the evidence we have, we assign a certain percent likelihood to an event’s having happened. This reflects our incomplete information, and is how most of the reasoning in law, medicine, history, and so forth, is forced to work, given our incomplete knowledge.
Take differential diagnosis in medicine, for example. Everyone would like to be able to tell with 100% certainty which patient has which disease. No patient wants to hear, “There’s a 70% chance that your symptoms indicate this disease.” In practice, however, patients often don’t get that lucky. (I should know.)
Believing something with 100% certainty means no amount of evidence contradicting that belief would ever get you to doubt that belief. That is how the math works. In order to keep the likelihood scale consistent, 0% is the figure used to denote 100% disbelief — that no amount of evidence would ever get you to believe that belief. If evidence for or against your belief weighs about equally either way, that’s a sign you’re around the 50% mark.
Exactly. And this 100% chance all of us will never know what really went on, and cannot be certain, is why we resort to intuitively estimating likelihoods instead. From James Clerk Maxwell —
We all do this intuitively. If we did not, how could standards of reasonable doubt hold in a courtroom? And yet all of us here probably believe in the justice of reasonable doubt, even though lack of reasonable doubt isn’t 100% certainty.
In some scenarios, what we already do intuitively can be made into an explicit mathematical model. For example, it’s possible to mathematically model Blackstone’s Ratio that “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” For fellow geeks, here’s the easiest diagram to explain it, taken from a pretty comprehensive paper modeling Blackstone’s ratio, and explaining the limitations on such modeling:
Now, saying it can be modeled is not saying it’s simple, and it’s definitely not saying we know all the necessary parameters to flesh out this model for real-life use — maddeningly, we do not, and we should acknowledge that we do not. Whether or not we explicitly know the parameters, though, the kind of moral reasoning we use is the same: it is the kind of moral reasoning that acknowledges doubts reasonable to the problem at hand.
For example, if our duty is to condemn another human being, we want very little doubt in our minds of his wickedness before we do it. We can’t expect 100% certainty of his wickedness, but we want our certainty to be quite high. If our duty is to avoid an avoidable risk, such as might be posed by a stranger in a dark alley, we can be pretty uncertain the stranger actually is wicked enough to pose a threat to us, and still be justified in avoiding sharing an alley with him. If someone struck you, for whatever reason, as 10% likely to harm you in a dark alley, who’d blame you for avoiding him there? Nobody should. Just as nobody should confuse your avoidance of risk with condemning the stranger for wickedness just because he might pose a threat.
Contrary to what you say, it is possible to appeal to someone’s lack of specific knowledge in order to change his mind. In fact, the very fact that X doesn’t know anyone who was in the room at the alleged party would be appealed to in order to change X’s mind, if X’s problem were X were too certain of Kavanaugh’s guilt.
Changing someone’s mind in the direction of greater doubt is still changing someone’s mind.
@gaius, both you and I apparently agree it’s immoral to be too certain about some things. Where we disagree, it appears, is what role attempting to quantify uncertainty should play in moral reasoning. You seem to be saying that attempting to quantify uncertainty imposes a spurious sense of certainty, while what I’m arguing is that attempting to quantify uncertainty can force us to face up to how uncertain we really are — indeed, how uncertain we should be.
You rather eloquently wrote of Kavanaugh’s role as a “preppy judge shaped” hole people have filled in with indirect information. Ford makes a similar preppy hole, one conservative bystanders have had very little trouble filling in with indirect inferences of Ford as a vengeful feminist villainess or Feinstein’s neurotic dupe. For that matter, many conservatives have had very little trouble filling in Kavanaugh’s preppy judge shaped hole with what have struck me as unwarrantedly specific narratives of Kavanaugh’s heroism. Do such narratives adequately acknowledge uncertainty? I doubt they do. For me, attempts to quantify uncertainty help us face up to this fact.
Personally, I’m sympathetic to what you say here, and I believe it is a more likely explanation of Kavanaugh’s sheepishness about his youthful behavior than is the chance that Kavanaugh really did have something worth hiding:
But how much should that more likely weigh? As you point out, not too much, which leaves more room for alternate possibilities.
I’m not sure I understand you but I don’t think that this is an accurate description of what I’m trying to say. As a member of a civil society Brett Kavanaugh is entitled to be considered a decent and honorable man until that presumption has been rebutted. Assigning probability to his guilt below the threshold necessary to do that relegates him to the status of someone who is “probably” or “maybe” a decent man, without any corroborating evidence of the allegations against him. That, additionally, sets up a perverse incentive structure for future accusations. Even if Christine Ford is making her accusations in good faith, her ability to raise your estimation of Kavaunaugh’s guilt to 10%from whatever your default estimation of male likelihood to have attempted rape might be, clears the path for others to make similarly unverifiable accusations and effect a similar hit on their target’s reputation.
I find these insinuations about Ford to be equally troubling. She shouldn’t be treated as the allegorical feminist prof. any more than the Kavanaugh should be treated as the allegorical entitled white man. If I’m not as upset about these characterizations its primarily because they haven’t taken hold in the culture to nearly the same degree. My default assumptions are that Kavanaugh is 100% innocent and that Ford has made her claims in perfect good faith due to faulty remembrance. I believe that we should speak and act based on these assumptions until they have been refuted with sufficient certainty to justify the remaining risk that we may be damning the reputation of a blameless party.
My point is that indirect information shouldn’t count for much of anything in these situations. @midge , I found the experiences of the women in your family with men to be interesting and movingly told, but they have as much to do with Brett Kavanaugh as your family’s history with black guys would have to do with Clarance Thomas. We’re individuals not categories. These kind of collective judgments of probability based on demographic information may be good enough for insurance adjusters–in fact they’re entirely justified in that setting because dollars and cents rather than reputations are on the line–but they should play no role in how we relate to each other as citizens.
@gaius, I am not assigning a probability below the threshold necessary to consider Kavanaugh a decent man. I do consider him such — and I also realize that, in making that judgment, I have no warrant to consider him decent with 100% certainty — but I don’t have to: that’s what giving someone the benefit of the doubt means.
Your worry, then, is also not about Kavanaugh himself, but about others, not Kavanaugh, who might be indirectly harmed. That is, you are worried about our sort. And that’s a perfectly understandable worry: How should we behave, and what should we believe, in order to get our sort treated fairly? (And might it be to our advantage to believe something other than the most likely truth if such a belief would put us in a better bargaining position?)
But please realize that, when you make this about our sort, you are making it about more than Kavanaugh, too. You are also making it about a type of person, a general class, whom you are interested in protecting. And that’s fine. But, if you are worried that a ballpark estimation (which wasn’t mine, actually, just one I considered reasonable) as low as 10% is enough to crack open the door for mischief toward our sort, no matter how much the estimator of that 10% might be inclined to give Kavanaugh as an individual the benefit of the doubt, then I don’t think it’s unreasonable to consider the doubts others might have about our sort in general, rather than just Kavanaugh considered as pure individual, unrepresentative of any particular “sort”.
When I mused on circling the wagons, it was circling the wagons for individuals, not circling the wagons on an entire class of people. Nonetheless, partisan politics often expects that we will circle around our sort — with justifications like “our sort would never do that — but if one of our sort did, it was probably OK”. That was the justification my own mother gave. And that justification does strike me as fishy. Because, as firmly as I believe in giving Kavanaugh the individual the benefit of the doubt (I think you and I are agree on that, though we describe it in different language), once we start thinking about what Kavanaugh’s treatment says about our sort, we’re back in the realm of populations, not individuals. We’re back in the realm of actuarial thinking:
a realm which does play a role in how we assess the risk our fellow citizens pose to us, even if the estimates are too weak to justify assigning blame to them. As I said,
A great many Americans seem to believe it’s possible that someone like Kavanaugh could have done something like what Ford described. How come? It would be nice to dismiss their belief as all prejudice or baggage, but I don’t think it’s that simple. Based on what we ourselves know of the world, I don’t think we’re justified when we show no empathy for the Americans who believe this, even though we should firmly maintain that it was right to give Kavanaugh the benefit of the doubt.
If I were a teenage girl, and I heard rumors about a guy similar to the story Ford told about Kavanaugh, would I be justified in avoiding being “too alone” with that guy at parties? — hell yes! In fact conservatives would tell me that I’d be monumentally stupid as a woman if I didn’t. Conservatives love chastising girls on the importance of looking out for themselves — and well, that’s what a girl looking out for herself looks like: being willing to judge fellow citizens — male citizens in particular — as possibly posing risks to her, even though she shouldn’t use that same risk-assessment to condemn them.
Of course, whatever risk Kavanaugh may have posed to the gals in his partying youth (if indeed he posed any) isn’t really relevant to the “risks” Kavanaugh might pose sitting as a SCOTUS justice. Or, at the very least, the worldview that’s likely to presuppose a strong relationship between those risks is a worldview we do not share: we don’t classify teenage behavior and allegedly “anti-woman” legislation as being aspects of “male aggression” barely worth distinguishing.
This is most emphatically NOT what I’m saying. Worrying about the reputational damage to Kavanaugh is in no way mutually exclusive of worrying about the terrible precedent set by his treatment. Nor does that have anything to do with my sort whatever that might be. You seem to be reading a tribalism in to my comments that isn’t supported by anything I actually wrote. As I said, I find conservatives’ pidgeonholing of Ford to be equally wrongheaded, just less successful. I have no illusion that Republicans would never stoop to this and I very much would like to think that I would make the same objections to a democratic nominee being treated in this way. This is about standards of civility for citizens living under a republic form of government. That is to say its about what kind of rules we want to have applied to both sides. Civility is an agreement to treat each other fairly even when our short term interests are at odds. The question of what degree of fairness Kavanaugh deserves as an individual is inextricably linked to the question of what kind of precedent we want to set in order to ensure social peace within our democracy over the long term. Much more than being non-mutually-exclusive, the questions cannot be considered except together.
@midge, you seem to think that because Kavanaugh was ultimately confirmed, he’s received the benefit of the doubt; he hasn’t. He’s had an asterisk attached to his good name as a kind of partisan entry toll to the highest court in the land. That too sets a precedent. The kind of person who would trade 10% of his reputation to gain high political office, is not the kind that I want dominating public life, but that is the kind of public servant we’ll get if we don’t start taking standards of civility seriously in how we discuss these kind of cases.
Um… it seems to me we are agreeing here. That is, you are also worried about the non-Kavanaughs who might be harmed if a bad precedent was set, which is what I said. Worrying about those who aren’t Kavanaugh doesn’t preclude worrying about Kavanaugh. It just means you aren’t confining your worry to Kavanaugh, but are also extending it to a larger class of people.
We both agree, then, that it’s about more than Kavanaugh. Which is progress, I think, since at first it seemed to me you claimed it was only about Kavanaugh.
That’s a fair criticism. I agree what you wrote should be distinguished from what those on the right in general have written on this subject. That said, in general, I’ve found the right’s commentary on the matter pretty tribal, and there’s always a risk when you’re responding to both an individual and a wider audience (which I was) that you’ll unfairly impute the foibles of the wider audience to that individual.
I agree with this, @gaius.
I think I’ve focused on how civility mean giving benefit of the doubt even when there is some suspicion, so I don’t see myself as being unfair to Kavanaugh if I judge him most likely innocent, not 100% beyond suspicion, but certainly nowhere near suspicious enough to be denied the benefit of the doubt given the information we got. I think you’ve focused on whether it’s productive to retain residual suspicions toward someone you’ve already given the benefit of the doubt, with your argument being it’s not productive, and the civilized thing to do once benefit of the doubt has been given is to round residual suspicion down toward zero. Perhaps the perceived (im)morality of retaining residual suspicion depends on how easily someone separates small-but-not-near-zero chances from larger chances. I see the separation as plenty big enough for comfort. Others, evidently, do not.
Since 10% wasn’t my own estimate, but one that seemed in the ballpark to me, I’ve since played around with someone else’s toy model of the scenario, a toy model that struck me as not so unreasonable as a starting point, and according to that toy model, plugging all my suspicions in gives me an estimate of about 5%, not 10% — but of course these guesses are so rough that 5% and 10% remain within the ballpark of each other, which is about what I expected. That the difference between 5% and 10% probably doesn’t feel small to many conservatives — indeed that 10% seems alarmingly close to 100% for many — is interesting to me. And, I do think the feeling that 10% (or perhaps even 5%) is uncomfortably close to conceding guilt does have a lot of tribal politics behind it, even though not everyone who sees 10% (or 5%, or 2%…) as too large has to be doing it for tribal reasons.
Yea it is a nuanced argument and we are not in that zone right now. Anyway good post as usual Midge.
@midge, this is a fascinating post.
I betray my age and upbringing, but when I was in my teens, I could not even imagine pushing a young lady beyond the “normal” limits (then called “petting”) absent a clear invitation so to do.
For that reason, I could not feature a well brought up young man like Judge Kavanaugh behaving like the lady said that he did. I now see that my idea no longer fits with the world. I do wonder, though, where all the fathers and brothers of these young ladies are.