The American Conservative's Rod Dreher says he's spared from writing about the sordid tale of Josh Duggar since a certain Owen White, a psychiatric hospital worker, has done his writing for him:
Josh Duggar grew up in a home that was close to Bill Gothard. Gothard had to resign from his ministry because he fondled at least 32 girls. The Duggars were also connected with Doug Phillips, who was forced from his ministry after being outed as a sexual predator. The pastor of the Duggars' church, the man who gave Mrs. Duggar her Mother of the Year award, resigned after a sex scandal. The highway patrolman, a family friend and an elder in a church connected to the Duggars' religious circles, who was the first law enforcement person Jim Bob Duggar reported Josh's issues to, is now serving a 56 year prison sentence for child porn.
This sin is disgusting. All sin is disgusting. Josh Duggar isn’t any more disgusting than you or me…. This world is dirty, messy, hateful, unfair, and brutal. What the boy did was in keeping with the world around him, as he had experienced it. Let’s not kick a person who is down.
I'm all for that last part, but like Bill Murray in Ghostbusters, I'm a bit fuzzy on the preceding part — the whole "good and bad" thing; the matter of what, precisely, constitutes "sin" and what doesn't. After years of anguished meditation, Herr Doktor Kant once categorically believed he had discovered morality's universal imperatives. It took about 10 minutes for critics to unravel Kant's tidy philosophical designs. Monsieur Montaigne, the founder of my far more befuddled camp, was content to flounder in epistemological wonder and to live and let live, as God-fearing, sin-dreading Christians slaughtered each other all around him. What Montaigne's fellow Westerners were doing was considered splendidly pious in his time; now, it seems, only members of ISIS and Shia militia are similarly pious.
As I understand it, God's laws are immutable. Having perused the Bible and the Koran, I'm forced to agree with Mr. White that "this world," by human scriptural design, "is dirty, messy, hateful, unfair, and brutal." What God's laws are — or what God is, or if God is — remains a mystery to me. Hence the superiority of secular law over Huckabeean theocracy, which is every bit as valid and honorable as that of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
This leads me to another agreement with Mr. White, who wrote: "If we are to point fingers, I would start with those who profited by upholding his family to the public as exemplary and worthy of attention. I would then turn to Josh Duggar's parents, who agreed to that public life, to that money, and who embraced a perverse religion, a contemptible patriarchy, and lord only knows how many lies and cover-ups."
If I read White correctly, buried in his condemnations is my Emersonian revulsion at institutional thought — or groupthink — be it the herd mentality of capitalism, socialism, party politics, organized religion, higher and lower education, the military, what have you. They're all corruptible, and in their vast power, they're all corrupted. Josh Duggar was a victim of at least three, and his victimization went on to victimize others. Yet Duggar's victimizers were also victimized — by the allure of wealth at all costs, by the madness of party politics (right wing, as Dreher notes), and by the bewitching seduction of organized religion, which can, in many instances, make the unbridled greed of capitalism seem almost virtuous.
"Josh Duggar isn’t any more disgusting than you or me." That's probably true, if we were to examine our own consciences, which few of us do. Thus mob-opponent Jesus' observation about stones and such. His message, however, has been rarely observed, for we are all part of a pack of one or more herds. And until humanity atomizes in the best sense of the word — which is to say, Montaigne and Emerson's sense, that of really thinking for and examining ourselves — we'll remain stuck in the sewer of groupthink.
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update: A commenter (below) notes the paradox: "Why do I, or any of us, put forward arguments in defense of our ideas and beliefs if not [to] persuade others to join our herd?… Groupthink is both what we fear, and our goal.. Groupthink. Another word for which is consensus." Allow me to present an even larger paradox. The argument advanced (above) — about which I harbor no delusions of persuasion — is that of skepticism, which is both the pursuit of an intellectual consensus, and the shattering of it.