Usually, yes. They do. I don’t think it is unavoidable, though, and I’d like to think about it with you today. The “revolution” I have in mind today isn’t really a revolution in the strict sense; it is the women’s liberation movement. I do think there are some common elements, however, and those will the the subject of today’s essay.
How revolutions work
Here is a perfectly acceptable introduction to this expression. I found it on Yahoo Answers and in some other circumstances, there are things I would quibble with but it’s just fine for today. The question posed was, “What does the saying mean: ‘Revolutions eat their children’?”
In general, it refers to the fact that after the initial successful revolution, there comes a period of revolutionary justice. Initially, the revolutionary justice is applied to the members of the old regime. Then, as the revolutionaries begin to fight each other for power, the same techniques that were used to justify the necessity of killing and imprisoning the former rulers are now used to justify the killing of the members of the revolution that have fallen out with the powers that be.
However complicated the actual dynamics of a society might be, the need for revolutionary fervor requires that those dynamics be simplified. We are good—at the very least, our aims are good—and those people are bad. Now it is true that they oppose our legitimate aims, but that isn’t why they need to be cast into outer darkness. They need to be cast into outer darkness because they are evil. Did I mention that there is some simplification involved.
It isn’t that these people “do evil things;” it is that they “are” evil. And it isn’t that they do
“some evil things” along with all the good things; all the things they do are evil because they, themselves, are evil. And their evil character is obvious. It doesn’t require group decision making or the preponderance of the evidence or anything like that. It is obvious to everyone.
Well…in practice, things are more complicated and the people running the revolution—not, as a rule, the people who started it, but the people who took it over from the ones who started it—do some morally ambiguous things. They also make mistakes. It would be hard not to.
In the next step, a well choreographed sequence, someone who has the long-term success of the revolution at heart, points out those actions endanger the success of the revolution. This phase of the revolution requires an infallible directorate of some kind. If, as this friendly partisan points out, they have gone too far, then they are not “infallible.” So either the claim of infallibility has to go or the person who raised the obstacle needs to go. Given the choice, they turn against their former comrade and he goes to the guillotine or to the Gulag or into exile, which resolves the problem in the short run. The very very short run.
And there are more people, it turns out, who were true blue revolutionaries but who really hate to see this good-hearted friend of the revolution killed for “crimes of good judgment” and they object. At which point they follow him to the guillotine (or wherever) because the logic of infallibility still prevails. And that is how the revolutions eat their children.
Revolutions produce dictators
But revolutions produce a great deal of disorder and in the long run, people really demand order. Not just an end to the killing, although that would be nice, but a return to the days when things worked. You could go to work or raise a family without being taken by the mob. At that point, some strongman domes along. Napoleon ended the revolutionary fervor in France, Hitler ended the period of national disgrace in Germany, Stalin protected “socialism in one country” in the Soviet Union. There’s always somebody, when it goes that far.
But what would it be like if it didn’t go that far?
So now let me come back to the current phase of the gender wars in the United States. There have been a lot of very famous men recently, who have seen their careers implode because of accusations of sexual harassment. In noting that, I am not saying that they should not. For some of these men, the career-imploding decisions happened a long time ago and justice has been tardy. But then, the logic of expansion takes over. It turns out that the sense of power that comes from successfully accusing a man of misbehavior is a very heady sense. Also, it’s the right thing to do. And also, if you don’t, you are letting down your sisters. And also, if enough women want to get in on that experience, they create a logic that drives downward the standard for the crimes you can be accused of.
In this phase, accusation is very nearly the same thing as conviction so the scale of those 
convicted moves from hardened sexual predators to occasional predators to men who suffered instances of bad judgment to people who were insensitive to the response a woman might have had to what had appeared to be a consensual act at the time. So when I say that accusation feels so good—it is “empowering”—that it drives downward the standard for crimes committed, it is movement along this scale that I have in mind. [1] I found this a fascinating collection of familiar faces and Cosby was well into his practice of predation by this time.
I suspect that there are quite a few women who would like to see the men whose offenses are at the “misunderstanding” end of the continuum spared the treatment that is so richly merited by the men at the “predator” end. In practice, this would amount to distinguishing sexual “felonies” from sexual “misdemeanors.” It would separate misunderstandings from intentional violations of women who make no secret of their opposition.
I am going to say in the next section that those women, the ones I imagined in the previous paragraph, should stand up and make their views known. That will mean “reasoning with the mob” in the revolutionary metaphor I have been using, but at the very least, it will involve trying to talk reason to your sisters who are angry at the moment.
If they don’t
But before I get that far, let’s imagine what will happen if they don’t. Following the revolutionary model, there will be two kinds of responses. The first is that people will distort their own lives and thoughts to avoid appearing of interest to the prosecutors who are running the movement by this time. In the time of the French Revolution, for instance, an alternative pack of playing cards was invented, one in which the face cards did not refer to royalty. By the logic of the movement, people who are caught playing with the “old cards,” the “royalty-affirming” cards, will be found guilty and punished.
The second response is that the anger of those who are punished and of those who resent the loss of any predictable social order at all, will provide a backlash. They will become hospitable to anyone who offers to set things right again—Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin all promised that. And after that, there will be some decisively new regime. A monarchy was restored in France; the party leadership became the new elites in the Soviet Union; a democratic government was forced upon Germany by the Allies after a humiliating military defeat. This is the backlash phase.
If they do
Both those phases are unfortunate and, taking the long view, unnecessary. What is needed is for the moderate center of the movement to stand up at the right time and say “enough is enough.” The joy of accusation, the thrill of empowerment, needs to be confined to those men who are operating on the left edge of the spectrum. The people on the right edge need to be defended by the women who, themselves, were a part of the misunderstanding and would like to see communication improved. As a rule, if you are going to improve communication, you will need someone who is willing to talk with you. The threat of the guillotine very seldom produces that kind of willingness.
There is a sense in which all this seems a reasonable thing to do and in one sense, it is. But something else is going on as well. There is a line that could be drawn between premeditated predation in the Bill Cosby style and the misunderstanding a man and a woman had at a party. But that line is not going to be successfully drawn by men for what seem to me to be obvious reasons. (More in a moment.) It is going to have to be drawn by women who see the value of drawing that line and who are willing to pay the price.
There is a logic here that has nothing to do with sexual relations. Adam Serwer, in a recent Atlantic article, makes the same point about President Obama and the wave of anti-immigrant hostility. James Zogby, of the Arab American Institute, is quoted in Serwer’s article. In opposition to the charge that Obama should have spoken out more forcefully against the anti-Muslim hostility, Zogby says:
“I would say that the people he needs to speak to see him as the problem. It was the responsibility of the Republicans to speak out and they didn’t.”
And why was it the responsibility of Republicans? Because it is their movement that is going somewhere they don’t want it to go and because they have the status (we are Republicans, too) to counsel their own partisans. They would be saying something like, “As people who have been with movement since the beginning, we ask you not to drive it into absurdity, not to ruin by your excess, what we all valued in the beginning.”
Women and drawing the line
It is the job of the women who care about where the relations between the sexes are going who have the responsibility to speak up. Why not the men? Because they have a prominent interest in not being accused of things and therefore their testimony can be readily set aside. Why not the hard left edge of the feminist movement? Because they are concerned narrowly with “punishing all the bad guys.” They are the revolution in its accelerated form. It is not their job to stop pursuing evildoers. It is their job to care about the unity of the movement and that is why they should listen to their more moderate sisters about how much is too much.
Otherwise, the feminist radicals will destroy the feminist moderates and that is what they mean when they say that “the revolution eats its children.” I’ve always thought it would make a clearer metaphor to say that the revolution eats its parents, but that isn’t how the saying goes.
That means that a substantial body of women need to stand up and say that these acts are evil and should be punished and those are mistakes and should be remedied and these over here are failures to anticipate how women might respond. Those need a little loving care and a little gentle instruction.
The radical edge of the movement puts all those together because the the speed and the breadth of the avalanche require it. But women who would like to save the feminist movement from destroying itself need to speak up now.
There really isn’t anyone else who can.
[1] Eventually, you get to the position taken by Jessica Bennett in the Sunday New York Times of December 17 that “society” has so schooled women that even their saying Yes isn’t really saying yes. That comes very close to the infantilization of women, in my view, and I would hate to see any of the women I care about tarred with that brush.
This is a very large change is how we have understood what we need to have to do our work during our workday. There was once the very general sense that you needed to do what was necessary to get a good night’s sleep because that was the foundation of a good day’s work. Consider Point 4 in this chart. From a commercial standpoint, that is a terrible plan because it provides no chance at all to sell energy drinks. [3] Nothing in this picture cues the reflection, “I’m really dragging today. I need to be sure to get a good night’s sleep tonight so I am more alert tomorrow.”
and battery and that “it” needs to be charged up so that “you” will feel energetic. In fact, you ARE the battery and the recharger—both, simultaneously—and if you were really determined to stay with the metaphor, all you need to do is to make sure the battery charger part of you is still connected to the house current. The only way I know to do that is to sleep adequately and to eat well and to exercise wisely. You, the battery recharger, will work just fine if you do that and you, the battery, will have all the portable energy you need.
neither a food nor a drug. It is a “food supplement” and they don’t study the effects of those until they start making people sick.
They said “We saw his star as it rose…” To get what that means, you have to give up the regular rotation of heavenly bodies. They were not saying, “We saw Venus come up again and we were so excited.” They are sawing, “A new star—a never before seen star—appeared in the heavens.” And they are saying. “We know from where and when it appeared, just what it means. It means there is a new king, an heir apparent.” Here is the traditional “following the star through the desert” picture. What a waste.
Not to knock the Wise Men too much. The star did reappear to them in Jerusalem and it guided them the remaining five miles to Bethlehem. Not only that, the star “stopped” and it “stood over” the house where Joseph and Mary and their little toddler, Jesus, were living. [6] It’s difficult for us moderns to understand just what itmeans for a star to stand “over” a house. My son, Doug, has another idea. He thinks the Wise Men just went to the house with the Christmas lights on. Right there on your left, on Main Street.
fraction thereof I could manage. I was supposed to run 1776 miles between the 4th of July in 1976 and the 4th of July in 1977. This was to be the kind of thing joggers did to commemorate 1776, the year the Declaration of Independence was signed. I had fallen behind during the winter and I was taking long runs several times a week and no matter how long the run was, I added that little half mile around new faculty circle—just to get the extra milage. And so I wouldn’t be thinking of them as just more running, I called them “victory laps.” This is Brittain Lake. The western part of the victory lap passed just uphill from the edge of this picture. And the picture below–that’s me in 1977 finishing the 1776th mile–is on the far side of the lake.
Invictus, President Mandela (Morgan Freeman) instructs his head of security, Jason Tshabalala in the need for white people in the security detail. “Forgiveness starts here,” says Mandela. In the second one, Pay It Forward, Arlene McKinney (Helen Hunt) comes to the railroad yard where the homeless gather to offer forgiveness to her mother, who lives there. There are more than 40 seconds of wordless images, showing first the mother’s face, then the daughters, as both women realize what has been done. Here is Angie Dickinson as the mother, talking to the reporter who broke the story.
I have found very few people in the category I would call “non-Christian” who are not members of some other faith. But there are some–really, there are– who have had so little contact with Christianity than they have no feelings for or against it. They are the missionaries’ dream of primitives who have no religion at all. Blank slates waiting to be written on.
think it will offer the largest challenge. A bunch of Christians with different backgrounds, different traditions of scriptural interpretation, different ways of making their faith make sense, will see these simple film fragments differently. And these differences may be fanned into disagreements. There is no way of telling, really.
describing—and have thought there was no way they could get there with integrity, I’d be happy to offer my own experience to them as an encouragement. [6] I can do that because I am aware, more than most people, of how I got where I am. I like being where I am even while I know it won’t do for everyone what it has done for me. Robin the Brave, here, with Princess Melora.
what I feel and what I know and what I do are always in some kind of tenuous balance—very much like the BOSU ball shown here.
I began my trip toward this destination while watching an episode of The Mentalist. Patrick Jane, who has done his share of onstage magic, asks why it is that magicians are accompanied on the stage by beautiful young women in skimpy outfits. The reason he gave is that the more time the audience spends looking at the assistant, the more leeway the magician has for managing his feats of illusion without being caught at it. The presence of the young woman means that the “eyeballs,” in the current phrasing, are going to be over there while the things the magician cares about are over here.
topic from the violence against blacks to whether Robert E. Lee should be revered as a patriot (Virginia, his highest loyalty) or decried as a racist and a traitor. Similarly, CHEB changed to topic from the rising militancy of the White Supremacy movement to “a clash of forces” in which both sides—remember that is the pro and anti Robert E. Lee “sides”—have honorable people. As horrible as those statements are, they are the assistant. What is the magician doing while I am gazing spellbound at the assistant?
means. Particularly, I am interested in what “and” means. What is the relationship between Joseph’s righteousness and his mercy—his choosing the quietest, least painful way available to treat Mary’s “infidelity.” [2]
The second is that “and” means something more like “but,” or “even though.” Joseph showed mercy to Mary “even though” he was a righteous man. Righteous in this sense means “knowing and observing the Law of Moses.” We know what the Law of Moses says could be done—the actual practices may have varied by region and certainly varied by historical period—to Mary because of her obvious infidelity. She was, in fact, pregnant, and Joseph was not the father, so we find ourselves in “the usual suspects” territory.
it, I should tell you that this is not a spider. It is a decal representing a spider. The decal does everything you want it to do. It affects people who know they are being affected by it and people who don’t know. And everyone it affects is affected in the same way. Their marksmanship improves whether they are attending to it or not.
device. People like to aim at targets. But targets have two disadvantages that spiders do not have. First, you know they were put there in an attempt to manipulate you. Not everyone likes that. Second, if there is a place you are supposed to hit, there is the chance that you could miss it. You could, in other words, fail. Not everyone likes that either. And besides, what good does it do anyone for you to hit a target.
nevertheless, have views on how children should be raised, have a dilemma. I learned what the right goals of childrearing are from my parents and got a refresher course by being a parent and a step-parent. I know what is right and why it is right. I have never asked what would be the right kind of childrearing if the goal were, as in the case of the working class, to ensure that no one sinks to “hard living.” So in confronting this question, I am facing a question I have never faced before. I need to ask, of the child rearing practices of the working class, “Will they meet the goals of the parents?”
But there are some differences as well. Lubrano’s father raised him to be a really good bricklayer, but Lubrano became a journalist instead. A father in our society in preparing the sons to do the same kind of work he does, is closing off a lot of other economic choices that the sons might prefer. That’s not true of the hunter.
the same problem I have. We need to be able to challenge these childrearing practices on either instrumental or on normative grounds. Those are the two I introduced above. We need, in other words, to say, “I understand your adopting those practices as a way to prepare your children for working class life, but actually, they won’t have that effect.” First, I’m not really sure that is true. Besides that, I am sure I am not in a position to say it even if it were true. So the instrumental case against those childrearing practices falls apart.
The Dilettante's Dilemma 