I Should Have Written This Post About Four And A Half Years Ago - Thoughts On The Epstein Document Dump And The Names Not Listed

OF COURSE among those named in the Jeffery Epstein papers released yesterday was William Jefferson Clinton who, of course, denied he had anything to do with the sexual abuse of young women and girls and, of course, that denial is widely disbelieved.  While there may sometimes be reason to not disbelieve such a denial, in the case of Bill Clinton the only one he has to blame for the extent of that disbelief is him and his known behavior with a young woman, though legally an adult, less than half his age while he was president.  If his denial is true it may be too bad that he will be disbelieved but he's got no one to blame but himself.

I glanced through the list of names I saw in the news this morning and most of them I wouldn't know from Adam or Eve (I was expecting fewer Women's' names, I suspect they listed victims as well as possible victimizers) and was surprised by there being so few names I recognized of those in the sciences.  We know that Epstein cultivated some of the big names and many of the not so big names in science and is known to have flown them around on his boy-joy jet and entertained them at his notorious properties.  I wonder if there is another batch of names coming out that will have more of them on it.

My surprise at that can be contrasted with that which the Nation columnist Katha Pollitt expressed a few years back about the connection between scientists (and so science) and the notorious human trafficker and sex criminal.   I used to always read Pollitt's column when I was a subscriber and generally liked her take on things.  But I've increasingly come to see there are problems in the foundations on which those ideas are laid.  They need far firmer foundations than she would accept for them.  I hope others give them those.   

 

In 2019 she said, quite naively:

Epstein’s stay at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center and his death on Saturday will breed multiple versions of the truth, and conflicting interpretations of scientific evidence. That, too, is fitting: Epstein, as it turned out, had been cultivating conflicting understandings of science for a long time through his donations to research institutions and the lasting friendships he formed with legitimate, renowned scientists.

And that’s what gets to me: the scientists. I can live with the idea that the 1 percenters who hung out with the financier Jeffrey Epstein are frivolous, heartless people who either don’t care if he sexually abused underage and barely of-age girls or spent decades living in a cave. I can be bewildered by Ghislaine Maxwell, who apparently had nothing better to do with her money and her fancy Oxford degree than to act as Epstein’s majordomo, social secretary, and procuress. I’ve read my Evelyn Waugh and my Edward St. Aubyn, and I get it: The British upper crust is famously depraved. As for the politicians, it’s no surprise that Donald Trump and Epstein went way back. Two masters of the universe with mansions in Palm Beach and a taste for very young women—why wouldn’t they like each other?

She also said:

What I can’t get over is how Epstein successfully weaseled his way into science at the highest level by cultivating major figures in the field socially and spreading his wealth around. Science! The very temple of the pursuit of truth. Call me insufficiently jaded, but am I wrong to expect more of those we rely on to combat all of the nonsense swirling around us?

The list of scientists whom Epstein wined and dined is like a Nobel Prize dinner table in Stockholm. Besides Stephen Hawking, there was Murray Gell-Mann, who proposed the existence of quarks; the cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky; the theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss; and many more (Virginia Guiffre, one of Epstein’s teenage victims, alleges that he forced her to have sex with Minsky, among other well-known people including Dershowitz.) “As some collect butterflies, he collects beautiful minds,” cooed a 2002 profile of Epstein by Landon Thomas Jr. in New York magazine. Beautiful young women were said to always be in attendance—but, as Daniel Engber observed in Slate, almost all the beautiful minds were male.

And what did the beautiful minds think of Epstein’s conviction? “I never actually believed this underage thing,” computer scientist Roger Schank told Slate. “They might have been in their early 20s or late teens, but when I talked to them…they were always in college or had just graduated college or something like that. They were not high school girls.” And Schank was not the only Epstein science crony to pooh-pooh the idea that Epstein’s girls were underage. “As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people,” said Krauss—who, for his part, chose to retire from Arizona State University in 2018 after accusations of sexual harassment spanning a decade and a university investigation that found he had grabbed a woman’s breast.

The Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker has vociferously denied having been part of the Epstein circle. “I could never stand the guy and always tried to keep my distance,” he told BuzzFeed News. As far as I know, as of this writing, the only scientist to apologize for his closeness to Epstein is the biologist George Church, who also teaches at Harvard. “There should have been more conversations about, should we be doing this, should we be helping this guy?” he told the health news website Stat. “There was just a lot of nerd tunnel vision.”

The most grotesque aspect of this high-IQ sausagefest, of course, was Epstein’s fantasy of transhumanism: improving the human race scientifically, in his case by inseminating women—perhaps 20 at a time—with his own sperm on his ranch in New Mexico. This sounds about as smart as his other idea, which was to have his head and penis cryogenically stored after his death for resuscitation in the future. This was the guy some of the most brilliant (male) minds of our era took seriously?

Well, maybe they just took the Dom Pérignon and lavish conferences on his private island seriously, to say nothing of the $6.5 million grant to help found Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (which the university has no intention of giving back). Maybe they tolerated him only in the hope of obtaining funding for their own projects. Or maybe they just worship the rich on general principles, as so many people do.

As sad as that is, I hope that’s the case. Because it’s even more painful to think they privately sympathize with eugenics and couldn’t even see what a crackpot idea this particular version of it was.

To which I can honestly be astounded that someone who went to college and grad school like Pollitt did could have maintained such a wacky rose-colored glasses view of scientists and, so, the science in whose minds is found the only place in the universe in which science is known to exist!  They are the gate keepers of what is officially to be considered and called "science" they are the ones who are the gatekeepers of who is let into that fraternity (science still largely being one) and whose ideas are allowed to be published as science and which ideas are forbidden to be science.  

Pollitt as a humanities grad (Philosophy and Writing) may had avoided knowing as many majors and instructors and professors in the sciences as I have but my education was in the humanities too.  I knew Women who went into science and heard more than one of them talk about having to put up with the boys club that science is, being the target of puerile, often sexual hazing and harassment, the casual sexism of male faculty on who their future in their chosen field depends.  When I first heard about the connection between Epstein and Maxwell to prominent departments of science at big name universities and celebrity scientists I don't think it gave me a 64th note length worth of pause.  I've known more than one ex-wife of a scientist who thought her ex was a total pig, including wives who were scientists, too.  

More unsurprising in Pollitt's surprise was her cultivated stupidity about the not uncommon acceptance and assumption of and the thoroughly scientific nature of eugenics.   But that's unsurprising only because the actual history of the fact that eugenics began with some of the most lauded and praised scientists of the 19th century,  Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, Ernst Haeckel, Karl Pearson, etc.  and had an uninterrupted history as university department level science among the most eminent scientists of the early 20th century - having only a short underground period after the liberation of the German eugenics centers, the death camps and the horror of what such science had wrought - to reemerge among many of the most eminent scientists (such as Watson and Crick) beginning in the 1960s and establishing essentially neo-eugenics within the wildly popular scientific schools of neo-Darwinism, Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology.   Only someone as willfully stupid as a conventional secular-liberal college grad of my generation could have missed that happening, even as there were minority viewpoints in science that called it what it was beginning in the mid-1970s.   Only someone as dishonest and willfully blind about the actual substance of the biological, social-pseudo (psychology, sociology, etc)  and trash sciences (such as "Darwinian economics") could have been surprised at the kind of scientists who Epstein would have been attracted to and cultivated not being much bothered by eugenics.  Not to mention some non-scientist sci-groupies like the ultra-Darwinist fundamentalist, the philosopher Daniel Dennett.

The fact is that as long as Darwinism, natural selection, is an established part of what is accepted as biology, eugenics, mild to genocidal, will arise within scientists and within the common holdings of science.  Within the framing of materialist, atheist, scientism, there is no countering moral absolute to prevent that happening and the naive conception of science give it enough force to even overcome the countering moral absolutes of revealed religion in far too many naive and gullible semi-believers.  As Pollitt is a feminist scholar, of sorts, I'd recommend the relevant writings of the great and undervalued 19th century radical feminist Frances Cobbe in that regard.  She was truly one of the more clear-eyed critics of natural selection in its long and not infrequently rotten history.

Which brings me to another thing about Pollitt in regard to this, her even more naive conception of morals and morality, though I'd guess she'd turn up her nose at anything in that line other than "ethics."   Pollitt was a signatory of the third iteration of the Humanist Manifesto - what I think of as the slacker-edition of it.  

In its version of the origin of morals or "ethics" it holds, as all secular, materialist, atheist, scientistic views of those must, that they are merely the product of some kind of social consensus,* there being no other source for those available.  As such there is no such a thing as a hard and fast morality that is not dependent on that consesus.  Which is rather a hard thing to find Katha Pollitt's (and my) holding that grooming, exploiting, seducing and raping teenage girls to be the sex toys of men with celebrity or power, money, in short, within the secularist, materialist, atheist, scientistic conception of "ethics".  Or, for that matter, coming to a "final solution" to eliminate any ethnic or other group which a majority in any society would want to eliminate.  Just as eugenics will always follow wherever natural selection is taken as a force of nature, so will such ideas follow when morality is considered to be merely the product of social convention or that mythological "consensus" that that idea is usually peddled in.

While there is a rather fluid and hardly universal social consensus among some at the moment that such a thing as sexually using children for sex is wrong - at least in the milieu in which Pollitt practices her profession, it's clear that there is a parallel social consensus that holds that if you can do it and get away with it, it's OK.  And, as Trump himself believes, if you're a celebrity, you can get away with a lot.  Look at the results of the 2008 judicial process against Epstein and how he was allowed to walk away with little to no cost.   The sexualization of young children in the media is not only permitted, it can make you billions on streaming services, other online and off-line venues for selling that.  If you want an example of what happens when you slam that, look up the word "Tumblr" in my archive.   Such is the milieu in which Jeffrey Epstein and his pimpess Ghislaine Maxwell and the many men who availed themselves of the girls and young women they groomed, seduced, isolated, threatened and coerced into being, in effect, raped by celebrities, millionaires, maybe billionaires, and, yes, scientists, is just as much a social consensus as the one that Pollitt and Me-Too hold as a social consensus.  While I'm sure there are many who participated and supported #Me-Too who have a more stable and less fluid structuring of morals or "ethics" if you reject that there is such a thing as a moral absolute you're up "Skepticism" creek without a paddle just wen you need it most.

I looked into that Humanist Manifesto that Pollitt signed and, just as I expected to see, I saw the name of the late Paul Kurtz circle sexologist Vern Bullough's name.  Vern Bullough was an atheist, social (arguably) scientist, who, I expect, held a similar view of the origin and conditions under which morality or "ethics" exists.  He clearly comes from approximately the same milieu in which Pollitt navigates and, before it became inconvenient to be open about such things, he was a supporter and editor of Paidika, a child sex abuse promoting and practicing entity which called for the elimination of laws setting a minum age of consent for a child to agree to have sex with an adult.  Such ideas were not uncommonly found among those circles in the 1970s and even into the 80s and participating in that or merely holding that as a desirable thing wouldn't get you black-balled from within those circles."   If anything, being a vigorous critic of that, such as Andrea Dworkin was, would be more likely to get you black balled.   And, as I've noted, it's long been a part of mainstream commercial culture, pop culture, movies, pop music, even those old relics, books.

Among the things I've learned since starting to address the culture of atheism, especially the "new atheists" how little room there is between such "ethics" as they might advocate and those of the vulgar materialists of the facist-Nazi-white supremacists.   I'd hold up someone she slammed in that article, Dershowitz, as a typical specimen of what that leads to.   I'd also remind her that that now moribund then hot-bed of the new atheism, the Science Blogs, were funded by Epstein and Maxwell.  

If nothing else there is something about science that has been obvious from the time that its founders started working for princes and kings and governments, scientists are always on the make for money.  Always.  I once was told by a particularly successful biologist that she felt like a shill because of the time she spent writing grants instead of doing her work.   That thirst for funding doesn't go down as the size of the science goes up.   That scientists are susceptible to the deep pockets of a morally corrupt pieces of scum like Epstein and Maxwell is about as unsurprising as them taking money from big business and the military.   

I'm frankly shocked that someone could reach Pollitt's age and not understand that much about one of the foremost forces in contemporary human culture.   Or notice the connection between that and such holdings that there is no such thing as any moral absolute.  And the convenience of having no such a thing as a moral absolute not interfering with it.  I'm kind of surprised that there aren't a lot more compromised sci-guys than there are on that list.  

*  Ethical values are derived from human need and interest as tested by experience. Humanists ground values in human welfare shaped by human circumstances, interests, and concerns and extended to the global ecosystem and beyond. We are committed to treating each person as having inherent worth and dignity, and to making informed choices in a context of freedom consonant with responsibility.    

There is certainly enough of a gaping chasm of a loophole in that pablum which, clearly, could contain advocacy for the legalization of adults raping children or, I also assert,  eugenics, everything from passively discouraging groups from having children up to and including active programs of genocide.   Eugenicists, almost to a person, saw what they did as being "consonant with responsibility" including their ranking of human beings on scales of economic (though not called that) value.