Justifiable Conduct: Self-Vindication in Memoir

Preface

Preface HALF A CENTURY AGO, during my first semester of graduate school, I enrolled in a course taught by Robert King Merton—then the most eminent sociologist in the world—entitled, as I recall, “Analysis of Social Structure.” The inaugural lecture was packed, as virtually all of his were, with fifty or sixty students in rapturous attendance. Merton began the course by explaining that in Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes argued that humans are naturally selfish, unruly, and individualistic and that if each one of us pursued what he or she coveted without respect for the rights of others, such behavior would engender a “war of all against all,” in which life would become “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes raised what eventually became the foundational question of sociology: “How is social order possible?” The answer the English philosopher offered was that societies demand that their members agree to an unspoken social contract: Abandon your natural, selfish desires, submit yourself to the rule of the sovereign, and what you receive in return is—life itself. Protection . Nourishment. Association. Connubiality. Intimacy. But, Merton added, when some of the society’s members stray too far from its rules— which we sociologists call norms—members of the society will formally or informally sanction them and oblige them to account for themselves. He encouraged us to answer Hobbes’s question in a more satisfying, persuasive , and analytically powerful manner: How is such a social contract carried out today? The question Merton mooted in his inaugural lecture stewed in my brain for five decades, and this book is the product. I wonder if he would viii / Preface have approved of my distillation of Hobbes’s argument. (Merton died in 2003, at the age of ninety-two.) Perhaps not. Though he was a seductive encourager of student research, Robert K. Merton was an extremely exacting and demanding critic. That some—or many—members of the society violate one or more of its norms, or those of its constituent collectivities, is hardly news. That people who do so blab at length about their transgressions, and on the scale that currently prevails, is a fairly recent development, although widely known. That violators who blab about normative violations do so in interesting and revealing (and not entirely predictable) ways is, in my estimation, an underreflected -upon phenomenon. Yes, social psychologists and sociologists have extensively investigated apologies (Tavuchis, 1991; Lazare, 2004), excuses (Snyder, Higgins, and Stucky, 1983; Maruna and Copes, 2005), confessions (Brooks, 2000), and scandals (Adut, 2008; Kipnis, 2010)—not to mention any and all manner of cognate verbal processes. But, for the most part, their inquiries focus mainly on violators who have been found out and are forcibly and rudely called upon to explain themselves—human deer, as it were, caught in the headlight of exposure. Instead, here, I explore transgressors’ well-thought-out and carefully constructed accounts of normative violations and their mostly self-serving interpretations , directed at audiences who may (or may not) endorse such presentations . My informants, if they may be called that, describe their deviant behavior (whether initially known or unknown) in a crafted, stage-managed fashion. Laura Kipnis (2010, p. 21) refers to “the hollowness of redemption” of these trapped human deer who clumsily (in her cases, unsuccessfully) attempt to bamboozle a vindictive audience into refraining from tearing them apart. But the targets of scandal have stepped into a mess—of their own making— on which social headlights have suddenly and inadvertently focused. Instead, my cases are made up of transgressors of someone’s norms who have gone on at length self-revealing—and, for the most part, exculpating—their selfsame putative violations. My authors have framed their discussions in ways that are very different from those of transgressors who are frozen in the act when the curtain is pulled back and the audience is aghast at or derisive about the discovery. In short, most of my authors have spent a substantial part of a lifetime reflecting on their putative transgressions and have crafted a mostly positive spin on what these acts mean, attempting some measure of vindication and redemption. Indeed, some do not even regard what they have done as wrong, do not even feel that they belong in the company of other miscreants , though they feel that explaining themselves is nonetheless necessary— and they are usually sincere in their belief in the truth of what they are saying and often prove persuasive in their rationales. As receivers, connoisseurs, and Preface / ix appreciators...