Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Eliot Spitzer: The Crusader as Compensator

We begin with an apology for gentle readers who have been unable to function in the absence of regular posts. Our excuse is that we have a life outside the blog.

And we take up one of the two hot political stories of the last week: the downfall of New York's crusading and whoring governor, Eliot Spitzer.

With many others, we ask why he did it. But we are asking about a different "it." Most pundits have asked why a successful, powerful, rising politician would risk his future by consorting with prostitutes. The predictable answers repeat the well-worn truism about the congruence of the lust for power and the lust for forbidden sex. The observation that Spitzer regularly stepped outside the bounds of ethics and even legality in his use of prosecutorial powers has been widely collated with his just-revealed habit of stepping outside the bounds of his marriage vows.

We ask a different question: Why did a man who lived a sordid private life fashion his public image as a moral crusader? Spitzer wasn't just a powerful politician addicted to sex, like Bill Clinton. He was an aggressive "reformer," a prosecutor who went after the most powerful figures with what was often the slimmest of justification. Meanwhile, he was privately using his own personal fortune--and likely some of the public purse in the form of security details--to break state and federal laws, not to mention his most sacred personal commitments.

In the SWNIDish experience, such a disparity is not surprising. Those who adopt the persona of crusader and whose crusades appear unbridled, disproportionate to the real nature of their object, are all too often those who harbor some hidden moral failing for which they seek to compensate with their crusading.

We note a particular case of our own experience, with particulars unaddressed to protect the identity of the guilty. Not quite a quarter century ago, we made brief acquaintance with a minister who took brief but intense interest in our SWNIDish career as a young graduate student. The minister decided to ask us about our view of an article, recently published in a prominent Christian journal, that addressed a topic of mild controversy. Expressing our qualified support for the article's point of view, we then experienced about 90 minutes of verbal scorn from our new acquaintance. Being young and inexperienced, we attempted dialogue in violation of the dominical saying recorded in Matthew 7:6, with predictable failure to come to a meeting of the minds. We left the conversation puzzled as to why anyone would argue so vociferously with a new acquaintance on a point of theology that was at most marginally consequential.

Months later, our adversary was revealed as a serial adulterer.

Since then, we have been impressed by other such cases in which individuals with secret moral failures attempt to balance them with their public posturing as ideological or moral exemplars. This, by the way, is more than the talented, charismatic public figure (politician or clergyman) who gratifies his ego with public adulation and private sexual predation. It is the individual who is privately drawn, even addicted, to a darkly immoral behavior and who couples it with a public persona of not just moral rectitude but aggressive moral leadership.

We hasten to add the obvious: not all crusaders are compensating for hidden sins, and not all who hide their sin compensate by crusading. But when a crusader is revealed as was Spitzer, we find ourselves unsurprised.

For SWNID, the lesson of such cases is this: human beings are inherently and persistently compelled to view themselves as moral creatures. Eliot Spitzer, no less than less prominent and powerful folk, wants to be fancied--by himself as much as by others--as a good person. Crusading against corruption in business and government gave him that sense, for him putting a bandage on the gaping wound of his sexual misbehavior.

For us, this is more than an example of the dangers of rationalization or the seductions of power or the pitfalls of relativism. It's ironic confirmation that people at their most lost want nothing more than to be restored to uprightness and significance. We just want to be found.

No comments: