27 August, 2007
All We Know

Buried in one of Stanley Fish's essays in The New York Times lies a fascinating piece of evidence for the collapse of social memory in America. The subject of the essay, "Hillary Clinton's Other Mate," is the 2008 election campaign. The subject of the buried evidence is the nature of homosexuality.

Mr. Fish quotes the singer Melissa Etheridge as putting the following question to Bill Richardson, the Governor of New Mexico: "Do you think homosexuality is a choice, or is it biological?" Mr. Richardson's answer is immaterial here, except that it was one of the alternatives offered him. What's fascinating is the question itself, which people have been routinely asking and answering for several years now without a sign of an inkling that anything is missing from it. Everybody debates whether homosexuality is chosen or inborn. Nobody questions the dichotomy. It seems that at some moment in the early twenty-first century, a piece of twentieth-century knowledge simply vanished without having been discredited and without even leaving a trace in the public memory.

It can't have been ten years since many Americans had that piece of knowledge at their fingertips. Ask them the cause of male homosexuality, and they'd start explaining at second hand the research consensus among psychologists, a consensus based on a wealth of clinical studies: that male homosexuality shows a high correlation with a certain pattern of parent-child relations, the main features of which are a cold or deliberately absent father and an over-protective mother. If that's so, then one may reasonably conclude that homosexuality is neither chosen nor inborn, but induced during childhood. That view was once commonplace. Now it seems that nobody remembers it. Without ever actually falling out of favor (although, like the other two views, it has its opponents), the psychological explanation of male homosexuality has fallen into an abyss. It has vanished the way ousted commissars used to vanish from photographs in the Soviet Union.

Fascinating, but how to account for it? Who is it that has this power to reach into the very consciousness of a free society and erase an entire line of thought? Across the political spectrum, it seems impossible to find a commentator who questions the framing of the homosexuality debate as a dichotomy between choice and biology. Everybody accepts it, but whose interests does it serve? At the rhetorical level, it serves the interests of those who advocate the biological thesis, since it counterposes that thesis to an alternative which most thinking people will reject out of hand. After all, given the social disadvantages, not to say perils, of being known as homosexual and the physical revulsion that must be overcome in order to reorient oneself sexually, it's fanciful to suppose that any number of people would want to do so even if they could. Few straw men can offer less resistance than the "choice" thesis of homosexuality.

But it's not at all clear that the essentialist or "inborn" thesis serves the interests of homosexuals themselves as a practical matter. There is an increasing amount of scientific evidence for some degree of biological predisposition. The logic of making the most of that evidence while ignoring the evidence of psychological causes (which is to say damage) is that it will bring homosexuality entirely within the realm of the normal and thereby maximize its respectability. However, that logic rests on a notion of normality that has no basis in either social attitudes or practical science.

The social reality crops up in The Haunting (1963), a psychological horror movie made long before the debate over homosexuality took its present self-conscious form. In it, we see a lesbian played by Claire Bloom continually mocking a love-starved heterosexual played by Julie Harris. Finally Harris's character strikes back with the following remark:

"The world is full of inconsistencies; unnatural things. Nature's mistakes, they're called. You, for instance."

The speaker of those words is an intelligent adult. She evidently believes that female homosexuality, at least, is inborn. And she throws that belief in the lesbian's teeth as if inborn homosexuality were a natural horror to rival the supernatural horrors surrounding them.

The scientific reality parallels the social one: a phenomenon may be recognized as natural without being categorized as normal. Medical researchers and practitioners, and by now many members of the general public, know of natural predispositions to various things such as cancer and alcoholism, but that knowledge does not normalize the conditions in question for most practical purposes. Alcoholics may experience some lessening of blame and self-blame, at most. People predisposed to cancer would surely be nonplussed to hear that since their condition was ordained by nature it deserves to be called normal. Cancer, alcoholism, and homosexuality are three very different things, but they all resist the logic of normalization. Faced with most such novel categories of normality, anybody would rather be normal the other way. Among people who are in fact homosexual, the rate of contentment is clearly higher than that; but proceeding from contentment to faux normality by the use of genetic evidence can easily do more harm than good. It won't deliver homosexuals from their social status as damaged beings. Ironically, only acceptance of the "choice" thesis can do that. More ironically, if the psychological thesis is true either alone or in combination with the biological one, and male homosexuality is even partly caused by the frustration of a boy's need to love and be loved by his father, then the strong essentialist thesis will have the cascading effects of letting fathers deny the harm they have done their sons; facilitating the same kind of harm in the future; and preventing an intelligent social response. Whether or not one thinks the state of homosexuality is a form of harm in itself, the formative experience of emotional rejection certainly is, and a movement that teaches society to look the other way will tend to spread the harm.

Why, then, is it happening? The misguided pursuit of normalization must be one factor. The news media's liking for new fashions in thought, along with their liking for simplistic dichotomies that lie along political fault lines, must be another. No doubt those forces are at work, but why are they prevailing so completely? Can it be that social memory has really collapsed to the point where common knowledge has no antecedents, but only contemporary echoes and reflections? When Will Rogers began his monologues by saying, "All I know is what I read in the paper," the effect was gently comical. If all you know is the latest buzz, you've got a knowledge problem. If the people you look to for sage commentary really can't remember knowing any more themselves, then what? Will Rogers was only kidding.

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