God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
—Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125
A Columbia University Professor has just been brought up on charges of incest with his adult daughter:
Columbia professor is charged with incest, accused of bedding young relative for 3 years
A popular Columbia professor was charged Thursday with incest - accused of a sick sex relationship with a female relative, prosecutors said.
Political science Prof. David Epstein, 46, bedded the young woman over a three-year period ending last year, according to court papers.
The story has become much commented upon in the blogosphere. That Professor Epstein was an example of liberal nastiness presents the Right Blogosphere with much occasion for schadenfreude; RS McCain has collected a fair number of links and offered his own commentary:
Palin-Hating Columbia Professor, Huffington Post Blogger, Busted for Incest
Let’s begin with a flashback, shall we? In July 2009, when Sarah Palin resigned as governor of Alaska, Columbia University professor David Epstein wrote at his Huffington Post blog:
Palin has done what weak, self-centered people do when the going gets tough — they quit and blame someone else.
Got that? Sarah Palin is “weak” and “self-centered.” And, Epstein added, “voters can rest a bit easier with . . . the knowledge that they chose wisely” in voting for Obama-Biden, not McCain-Palin.
Now, let’s flash forward to yesterday’s New York Daily News:
A popular Columbia professor was charged Thursday with incest – accused of a sick sex relationship with a female relative, prosecutors said.
Political science Prof. David Epstein, 46, bedded the young woman over a three-year period ending last year, according to court papers.
He was arraigned before a Manhattan judge on a single felony incest count.
Sources said the victim was over 18 when the relationship began in 2006 and that the two often exchanged twisted text messages.
Epstein faces up to four years behind bars if convicted.
This is the guy who called Sarah Palin “weak” and “self-centered.”
Project much, professor?
Legal bloggers have approached this story from their vantage point. Ann Althouse asks the legal question: [HT: Glenn Reynolds]
Eugene Volokh asks a series of related questions about the legal treatment of incest.
Glenn Reynolds asks the obvious question in a politically correct environment:
Also, why are they only charging the man in what’s said to have been a consensual relationship between adults? Isn’t that an equal protection violation? Where’s the civil rights community on this?
What the legal bloggers do not talk about is the limitations of the law in dealing with many different issues that are fundamentally moral rather than legal. The trend for the last 100 years, since the death of G-d was proclaimed, has been to enlarge the writ of the law while shrinking the reach of morality. The argument is made on a regular basis that there is little need for a Deity to instruct our morality. (I addressed some thoughts to this in a post last week: To Debate Religion ... or Not.) The question of incest is a perfect illustration of the limits of legally based morality and the inability to establish any limits when morality is divorced from the religious tradition from which it emerged.
Those who believe we can construct a morality divorced from our Judeo-Christian heritage suggest there is a universal morality that can be established based on what should be relatively self evident principles, most of which are iterations and derivatives of Game Theory. We are helpful and fair with others because the alternatives lead to poor outcomes for all. Yet if we do not privilege the Judeo-Christian ethics that are the underpinnings of our unconscious morality, we have no answer for cultures that take a very different, zero sum, approach to morality, ie I take what is yours and do what I want because I can and my god sanctions such behavior. In other words, once we have jettisoned our G-d, we have disarmed intellectually in the war with another's god.
Religion is devalued by so many sophisticates because religion, as practiced in the West, served to constrain our behavior. To be a moral man or woman was to accept limitations on the expression and gratification of our desires. Once we have, as a culture, fully adopted an ethic of Just Do It as the apotheosis of our morality, we are helpless against those who wish to Just Do It in ways which are inimical to us.
There is almost no way to construct a rational, legally based morality that forbids incest between adults. Most of us have a visceral reaction of disgust when we think about incest because the taboos are so deeply ingrained but the incest taboo can not be supported by rational argument alone. Since the Übermensch is defined by his ability to rise above conventional morality and create his own morality, there are no effective limits to the Übermensch; any purely rational morality designed by humans can be changed on a whim and fully rationalized as a new, emerging morality with minimal effort. The wreckage of the last century should have alerted us to the danger.
[For an interesting perspective on how Nietzsche's ideas were corrupted by the Nazis, see Professor Barry Rubin's post on The Strangest Antisemite of Them All: The Bizarre Case of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche did not mean to rationalize genocide but when G-d is dead all things can be rationalized by Homo rationalis.]
I have not even touched upon the psychology of incest, especially parent-child incest, which includes the refusal to accept limits and denial of differences. Incest is perverse in psychological terms because it destroys the meaning of words and differentiations. In parent-child incest the difference between generations is denied and the significance of the primal ties between parent and child are denied. Grown children remain the child of their parents no matter what their age which means that a chronologically adult child is still psychologically a child of the parent with whom he or she has incest. Perhaps some do rise above such conventional notions of morality; perhaps we are seeing the advent of the Übermensch, but we should be careful of accepting the continual and continued accrual of transgressions against our bourgeois (ie, Judeo-Christian) morality; at some point, just as termites can destroy a house by eroding its foundation in silence right until the moment, without warning, the house collapses, each small piece torn out of our moral fabric makes the collapse of our consensual culture more likely.
Curious addendum: As we get smaller and more insignificant in reality, with recent stories suggesting there may be three times as many stars in the universe as we thought and a new story suggesting we may have found evidence for the existence of other Universes, our sense of ourselves, our Hubris, or Narcissism, if you prefer, seems to keep getting grander in inverse proportion to our actual importance. If we are alone in the Universe, and so far there is no evidence we are not, that means in a Universe devoid of First Principles, we are simply an incredibly lucky accident of no particular import; only if there is (was?) a creator do we have any particular significance beyond ourselves, in the grand scheme of things.
Update: Welcome Instapundit readers and a thank you to Glenn for the link.
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