Press Action ::: Reflections on Scott Peterson and Rationalism

Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Reflections on Scott Peterson and Rationalism

By Jordy Cummings

"God is a concept by which we measure our pain”
-John Lennon

“They say opium is the religion of the masses, but I think its bullshit. My sister is a farmer, she has a shrine in her cattlefield. She worships bullshit. Saves fertilizer money.”
-John Cassavetes

“It is rare, but not unheard of for a man to be found guilty due to circumstantial evidence,” said the radio news report. That was about all I heard about the Scott Peterson trial. As someone who has not watched a television news broadcast since before the war in Iraq, I know little to nothing about the Scott Peterson murder trial, except that it sounds like a good Hitchcock movie.

Seriously though, there was something disturbing about the concept of anyone being found guilty of anything due to circumstantial evidence. From Chalabi’s lips to Judy Miller’s ears, let it be known that this kind of evidence often does not pan out. This is why it is all the more disturbing that a jury could exercise this kind of false logic.

People here in Canada, suffering from what Naomi Klein succinctly terms the “At least we’re better than them syndrome,” thus negating our own plutocratic government, often say that Americans are “irrational.” This is the stated term often used by our own capitalist pundits, opponents of U.S. imperialism to be sure, and often fans of investment opportunities to non-Americans to and from capitalist China (there is a war of Dollars and Euros and Chinese currency going on as we speak in Alberta’s untapped oil reserves—a reason why we should join OPEC, make like Mossadegh and nationalize the stuff) as well, that America in seeking to dominate the world’s oil supply, is irrational.

Why would it be irrational for the Godfather to make sure that he doesn’t have any competition from the other five families? Why would it be irrational for the Godfather, in deficit to another wily character, to attempt to negate that deficit by knocking out oil producing regimes with their own relationships with the various Mafia-Imperialist powers, whether they be democrats like Chavez or autocrats like Saddam?

What reason but rationality can dictate the destabilization of the Canadian government through that huckster Paul Celluci, when Chretien meekly tried to oppose Bush’s plans? How to interpret young Paul Martin’s decision to privatize our oil assets and sell them to China’s state oil company? Indeed the oilfields of Alberta sound like the perfect place for a future ground war between contending capitalist behemoths. Or Maybe Martin is quietly trying to check U.S. influence in Canada.

The war in Iraq and finding Scott Peterson guilty are manifestations of the same hyper-Cartesian rationalism, blind to dialectics, contradiction and anomaly. When my lawyer pal who’d followed the Peterson trial told me of such circumstantial evidence that had hung Peterson, he sounded pretty damned guilty to me, but not beyond a reasonable doubt. Anyone can go to one of the countless legal theory websites and see a pattern emerging, among U.S. prosecutors as well as judges, specifically those in the powerful “Federalist Society,” expedited since the Bush presidency to ignore standard rules of evidence. Saddam Hussein was a bad guy, but the charges just didn’t add up. Likewise, Scott Peterson may well be a sick #### who killed his wife in what should have been a “perfect murder,” but the jury decided to ignore the crucial component known as doubt.

Doubt is not a companion to rationality. While people often think that rationality is only to be asserted against, say, fundamentalism, many, both in the Humanist and Marxist traditions have shown that rationality involves as much mystification and suppression of logic and reason as does any of the he-god religions or sundry new age obscurantisms. Humanists will say that cold rationalism denies the notion of justice, recalling Michael Parenti’s trenchant essay on “rational fascism.” Parenti shows how it was perfectly rational for the business magnates and many politicians of the thirties to compliment the economic achievements of Hitler and Mussolini, admitting full well that their means of running a state seemed immoral. Their mode of rational logic is the core of fascism. It is not the brownshirts that make the fascist, it is the owner of the brownshirt factory.

Marx’s “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” showing that the bourgeoisie will gladly trade (or rather, augment) their socially liberal beliefs for power, will give one an even better understanding of the rationality of hedonistic capitalists of the Cuban cigar and single malt school who will rationally vote for Bush even though such capitalists may oppose Bush’s Imperialism, let alone his making Cuban cigars so expensive. But the cold rational logic of economics necessitates a Bush vote, no matter how many concessions Kerry makes to the capitalists.

It was irrational for fundamentalists, freepers, Christopher Hitchens and opportunists to go after Clinton because of the whole Monica shenanigan. It was perfectly rational for intelligent Republicans to go after Clinton on the issue, both in question of power, and in terms of the rationalist pretense of thinking that if you seem to demobilize your opponent, you do demobilize your opponent. They clearly thought, and many have written as much, that they would prevent Clinton from “moving left.” In fact, as Robin Blackburn has shown, the affair actually saved Social Security. So much for rationalism. Counter-intuition should be intuition.

In another major legal story the other week, half of the adult male population of Pitcairn Island (six guys), the site of the famed “Mutiny on the Bounty,” were found guilty of numerous sex crimes. Turns out the proletarian rebellion on the high seas two centuries back contained its own disavowed dialectical Captain Bligh. For those who haven’t seen the film or, better yet, gotten context from Hakim Bey or Markus Rediker on how “pirates” were commies, and multiracial to boot, the mutiny took place under the aegis of a Rumsfeld-like Captain, and in turn, eight mutineers, along with six Polynesian natives and 12 native women, took hold of an inhabited island. Most historians have been clear that their relationship with natives was nothing like a colonial master/slave relationship. Anyway, there were eight white people to 18 brown people. All intermarried, in many senses of the term.

Turns out two centuries later that for nearly the entire history of the island, bizarre incestuous sex rituals, including initiations of the young girls by the “fathers” of the tribe at the age of 10, reportedly took place. While the skeptic in me still sees a minute chance that this could be like the “ritual abuse” panic, this sure as hell is proof of the existence of the dialectic, in its ugliest, most visceral form. Contained within the seeds of the proletarian rebellion was its negation, the “Rum, Sodomy and the Lash” of the English Navy, patriarchy, incest, pedophilia. While it is entirely true that there are many such cultures and societies, including inside the States and England, and have been for millennia, the smallest English colonial possession, autonomous since its inception, specifically formed in romantic glory against such perversions. And here they are.

It isn’t any more rational that Pitcairn Islanders would turn out to be pedophiles than it is that an attack on a centrist president would turn out to empower him to do the opposite of what his opponents wanted. It is, rather, realist. Expecting the unexpected, as the saying goes, contains a paradox. How can one expect what is not “expected.” The key here is that rationality is fallible. As Donald Rumsfeld says, “There are known knowns, as in things we know we know. There are known unknowns, as in things we know we don’t know. Then there are unknown unknowns, as in things we don’t know we don’t know.” In quoting Rumsfeld, Slavoj Zizek adds, “and there are unknown knowns, as in things we don’t know we know.”

We know whatever evidence we may have for any position we take, or judgment we make, and we also in making such judgments, acknowledge the imperfection of our knowledge—taking into account as well that there are unimaginables and anomalies, the veritable “slime” of Sartre’s existentialism. But like Sartre when he discovered Marx, one has to acknowledge as well that there is a lot that you already know by intuition—“unknown knowns.” This has to be firmly separated, as it were, though, from just assuming that those fire trucks are sarin factories, or that the motive makes the murderer. The occupation of Iraq and the Pitcairn Islanders and Scott Peterson’s verdict are symptoms of the same cause. The angel of history always returns one way or another.

Jordy Cummings, editor of Pure Polemics, lives in Toronto and can be reached at yorgos33ca@yahoo.ca.

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