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Volume 22, Number 1/2/3 (1998) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum TELLING STORIES: ROMANCE AND DISSONANCE IN PROGRESSIVE LEGAL NARRATIVES MARK A. CLAWSON* I. INTRODUCTION The story of conspiracy and corrupted power makes an argument about what exactly is amiss in society—the structure of the story defines the evil that has corrupted those in power. Such a story provides a readily accessible structure requiring only that the narrator fill in a few simple blanks. Take, for example, the tangled history of a thin volume titled Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace.1 Its strange embrace, by both the political left and the political right, illustrates this story’s universal appeal. The report presented itself as the work of a secret government commission that was assigned to study the societal effects of a transition from cold war to permanent peace. When initially published in 1967, the book climbed onto The New York Times’ list of nonfiction bestsellers and, with the help of numerous reviews and a lengthy excerpt in Esquire magazine, Report from Iron Mountain immediately found its way into the mainstream of late-sixties political discussion.2 The work generated front-page coverage in The New York Times, questioning whether it was a suppressed government report or, instead, a clever hoax.3 Publications from Time to the Wall Street Journal speculated about the identity of “John Doe,” the shadowy social scientist who supposedly leaked the document.4 Finally, in 1972, Leonard Lewin confessed writing the entire report himself in order to, in his words, “caricature the bankruptcy of the think-tank mentality by pursuing its style of scientistic thinking to its logical ends.”5 Victor Navasky and several other left-liberal satirists--including Lewin--hatched the plan for Report from Iron Mountain after reading a New York Times column on a “Peace Scare” that caused the stock market to tumble.6 Navasky recently observed that their satire was a “brilliant imitation of thinktankese rendered in impenetrable bureaucratic prose, replete with pedantic, obfuscating footnotes.”7 The imitation was so convincing, in fact, that some refuse to acknowledge Report from Iron Mountain as a parody. Despite Lewin’s 1972 admission, a white-supremacist group from Arkansas wrote him a decade later, inquiring about the availability of any remaining copies.8 Then, in 1990, Lewin discovered that a right-wing publisher—of Holocaust revisionism and Hermann Goering’s autobiography—had begun printing his book, and advertisements for Iron Mountain appeared in publications that cater to the militia movement.9 The reprint acknowledged the 1972 announcement, but a statement on the back cover seemed to imply otherwise: “Does editor Leonard Lewin’s claim of authorship represent the truth? Or was it just another move in the deception game being played with exceptional cunning and skill?”10 And thus the conspiracy cycle began. Accepted as “a sort of Bible”11 among extremists on the far-right, the report confirms their darkest suspicions that “this is a plan for the destruction of the U.S.”12 Any attempt to deny the report’s authenticity fits neatly, and ironically, into the overall pattern of government deception.13 Indeed, Fletcher Prouty, a national security aide in the Kennedy Administration immediately believed in the report’s authenticity and, reportedly, still does.14 Prouty served as the model for Donald Sutherland’s enigmatic character in Oliver Stone’s film J.F.K.15 and, ironically, Lewin’s “John Doe” plays the same role—the insider willing, at personal risk, to betray the secrets of the inner sanctum. With this pattern set, further denials only confirm the conspiracy’s depth. This circularity led Navasky to sarcastically turn his denials on their head: “Guys, you’re right[,]” he wrote, “Report from Iron Mountain is a real government document. Remember: You read it here in the pro-Commie, pro[-]government, pro-Jewish, pro-African-American Nation.”16 Navasky’s ire clearly resulted from the unexpected consequence of his parody--it played best, or at least longest, to his political enemies. Report from Iron Mountain was intended to “provide magnificent fodder for [left-leaning] radicals”17 but instead became “a Rosetta stone for the right-wing fringe.”18 At first glance, the left and the right may seem to have little in common; the rhetorics of tolerance and totalitarianism seldom converge. However, the New Left of the sixties was fueled by energy from left-leaning radicals who distrusted the establishment, just as the New Right of the nineties is powered by right-wing radicals who, not surprisingly, distrust the establishment. Movements on both the left and the right use common themes, recurring patterns of narration to tell stories that motivate their adherents to action: they rely on the spectre of evil, the world turned upside down by corruption at the highest levels; they build upon the promise of heroism, acts of self-sacrifice for the collective good; and they lead toward the possibility of redemption, a re-ordering of the world that vanquishes evil. If these thematic descriptions seem somewhat trite, well, that makes the point. We’ve all heard these stories a thousand times. But that doesn’t mean narratives of evil and redemption lack persuasive power. After all, stories that confront us with a cyclical descent into a nightmare world followed by a return as a better self recur so often, and exist at such a visceral level, that they constitute the tools we use to make sense of the world around us. In a sense, these stories are our world. This article presents a closer look at the stories we tell, analyzing the narratives that are used to structure progressive law. Although the notion of recurring stories may, at first glance, seem remote from the study of law, the tradition of American law actually provides a rich context of narration. Initiatives are launched and outcomes are justified on the strength of stories. Facts and figures carry little force until contextualized into an argument. Likewise, the social movements grouped under the rubric of progressivism may appear somewhat arbitrarily chosen. But progressivism, as a social movement, fights against the status-quo, pushing to displace the world we have with something better. Because progressivism aspires to social revolution, progressive stories must defy conventional wisdom, seeking to change the minds of those who will listen. These stories provide an ideal backdrop for analyzing methods of legal narration: the first section of this article introduces the narrative as a social construct with the power to shape reality; the second section discusses the patterns that persistently recur in narratives; and the third section uses these recurring patterns of narration to analyze the dissonance that now characterizes progressive law. In addition to disagreement on issues of legal or factual interpretation, judicial decisions also evidence a prior question about what gets to be called law or fact. In other words, a decisionmaker must first decide what can go into the legal story. In the formalist tradition--the school of legal thought that introduced the case method under Harvard’s Dean Langdell--law was seen as an autonomous discipline. Thus, Langdell observed in the preface to his first casebook that: law, considered as a science, consists of certain principles or doctrines. . . . Each of these doctrines has arrived at its present state by slow . . . growth, extending in many cases through centuries. This growth is to be traced in the main through a series of cases; and much the shortest and best, if not the only way of mastering the doctrine effectually is by studying the cases in which it is embodied.20Langdell’s choice of “embodiment” was an apt metaphor. The formalists conceptualized law as a corporeal structure that could be understood exclusively through studying the appellate decisions which, taken as a whole, constitute that structure. Over a century later, we still educate by the case method, but casebooks and their titles have gradually incorporated other “materials.” These outside authorities, such as economics and philosophy, have been accorded greater legitimacy in legal circles during recent decades. They have gradually become “facts” subject to manipulation in legal narratives. Of course, this ascendance of outside sources faces some opposition. Charles Fried, a former Solicitor General, has lamented the “bad effect” of “nonlegal subjects . . . taking over law.”21 For him, the ideal of an insular law characterized by “discipline and order and limitation” is not possible so long as lawyers aspire to be “the architects of society [instead of] its janitors.”22 Indeed, Fried longs for legal education that is “once more . . . hard, rigorous, full of memorization” and legal scholarship that is characterized by “far fewer citations in law reviews to Derrida and Foucault.”23 Of course, the calling to social architecture has carried the day, Fried and other formalist voices speak in elegiac tones about a paradise lost, and legal stories now openly draw from the larger culture in which the law is embedded. To Fried’s chagrin, economic theory and social philosophy pack persuasive power in legal circles because the “institution” of law accords them legitimacy. An influential study of the process of legitimation, a mid-sixties work titled The Social Construction of Reality,24 outlined the process whereby knowledge25 is transmitted from one generation to the next. According to the authors, this knowledge is “learned as objective truth in the course of socialization and thus internalized as subjective reality. This reality in turn has the power to shape the individual.”26 The authors, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, observed that because individuals interact, they eventually produce a “social world” of shared understandings, “containing within it the roots of an expanding institutional order.”27 According to Berger and Luckmann, this order is maintained through legitimation, a process of “explaining” and “justifying” the knowledge of an institutional order to a new generation.28 Berger and Luckmann argued that legitimation occurs at four levels of knowledge; first, the most fundamental level of early life experiences about “how things are done;” second, the rudimentary, theoretical propositions of “moral maxims and wise sayings;” third, the “explicit theories” that provide “fairly comprehensive frames of reference for the respective sectors of institutionalized conduct;” and fourth, the creation of “symbolic universes[,] . . . bodies of theoretical tradition that integrate different provinces of meaning and encompass the institutional order in a symbolic totality. . . .”29 The creation of such universes allows individuals to focus on “everyday life;” because “the reality of everyday life . . . is the sphere to which all forms of institutional conduct and roles belong, the symbolic universe provides the ultimate legitimation of the institutional order by bestowing upon it . . . primacy in the hierarchy of human experience.”30 Thus, interaction among individuals in a community such as American law gradually produces an institution that constructs its own reality. That is, the institution legitimates certain knowledge by socially constructing a world in which that knowledge is taken for granted. That is why Berger and Luckmann observed that “the reality of everyday life maintains itself by being embodied in routines, which is the essence of institutionalization.”31 These routines, however, include harsh measures to ensure the maintenance of order. If a “deviant version of the symbolic universe [that carries] an alternate definition of reality” arises among some of those who shared the original version, then the “custodians of the ‘official’ definitions” use “conceptual machineries” and “repressive procedures” to “maintain the ‘official’universe against the heretical challenge.”32 This process occurs, of course, within every institution. Denial of tenure, disbarment or expulsion from “the club,” are all likewise punishment for heresy. Such punishments constitute the most pronounced form of socialization, a process defined as an “internalization of society as such and of the objective reality established therein, and, at the same time, the subjective establishment of a coherent and continuous identity.”33 Berger and Luckmann split this process of socialization into two parts: “primary socialization” in which the individual internalizes the basic structure of society, the roles an individual may adopt and the conception of an identity;34 and “secondary socialization” in which the individual internalizes “institutional or institution-based ‘subworlds’” that are characterized by “special knowledge.”35 Thus, primary socialization allows a child to become a functioning member of society while secondary socialization allows a law student to become a practicing member of the bar. As Berger and Luckmann observed, “identity is objectively defined as location in a certain world and can be subjectively appropriated only along with that world.”36 So the stories that seek to change the world also seek to change the socialized conception of identity. Notions of individual identity are, thus, intimately paired with the world in which they exist; that is to say, identity is socially constructed by a specific view of the world. This explains why one can view progressive narratives as polemics about identity, cultural arguments in an imperceptible socialization process. The concept of socialization has, itself, become part of our taken-for-granted social world. Berger and Luckmann’s work foreshadowed and influenced an entire generation’s efforts.37 Within sociology itself, this emphasis on socially constructed knowledge and socialized individuals has developed into a “new institutionalism” in organizational theory.38 For example, some organizational theorists have argued that the formal structures of organizations in post-industrial society “dramatically reflect the myths of their institutional environments instead of the demands of their work activities.”39 The argument is that form does not follow function when it comes to human interaction. Instead, form follows the taken-for-granted assumptions that surround institutions. This reflects the legitimation process working at a macro level.40 Thus, organizations are shaped by the culture in which they are embedded, but the new institutionalism argues further that the larger environments are shaped by their constituent organizations. Thus, “as new issues arise, these systems organize them in characteristic ways, and at least the more dominant polities successfully reproduce their structures over long periods of time.”41 Of course, this implies that the powerful in society perpetuate a system that favors their interests or, to put it differently, “he who has a bigger stick has a better chance of imposing his definitions of reality.”42 The stories we tell about our world are influenced by social institutions, but these stories also influence social institutions. In a curiously symbiotic relationship, stories both reflect the power sources in a given society and shape the future use of that power. The conception of subtle forces shaping stories and thus agendas, often to the disadvantage of the powerless, is not confined to organizational theory or even sociology. Political science and literary theory also share these observations. John Gaventa studied the political interactions of an Appalachian valley in order to explicate a theory of power that views the “malleable . . . consciousness of the relatively powerless [as] especially vulnerable to the power field around it.”43 Gaventa labeled this “third dimensional power,” the first two dimensions consisting of power derived from superior resources and power flowing from procedural control.44 “The study of socialization,” Gaventa observed, “may help to uncover the means by which domination is maintained or legitimacy instilled . . .”45 This is the familiar jargon of social construction in a different context. But even when the jargon is altered, the ideas are strikingly similar. Stanley Fish, writing as a literary critic, has observed that “unassailable facts are unassailable only because an act of persuasion has been so successful that it is no longer regarded as one, and instead has the status of a simple assertion about the world. In short, there are no facts that are not the products of persuasion. . . .”46 These acts of persuasion produce an “interpretive community” that places “constraints” on the future interpretations of that community.47 Fish has observed that “interpreters are constrained by their tacit awareness of what is possible and not possible to do, what is and is not a reasonable thing to say, and what will and will not be heard as evidence in a given enterprise.”48 If this sounds a lot like Gaventa’s third dimensional power or, for that matter, Berger and Luckmann’s description of social construction, it is no coincidence. Intellectuals, after all, constitute a socialized community that constrains the accepted modes of thought and expression. But social construction not only explains the inner workings of particular academic communities, it also tells a convincing story about the interactions of unrelated entities. Berger and Luckmann’s presentation uses the jargon of sociology, but their explanation succeeds because it applies equally well to the institution of American law or the homeowner’s association of a local condominium complex. Telling convincing stories is, in the end, the ultimate test of any theory.49 The jargon of institutional legitimation seems to explain Charles Fried’s desire to keep the law safe from outside threats. As an institution, the law can be seen as either an “interpretive community” or an “institutional subuniverse,”50 but the problem for insiders is maintaining autonomy. Thus, institutions such as the law can become “esoteric enclaves . . . sealed to all but those who have been properly initiated into their mysteries[,]” but “the increasing autonomy of subuniverses makes for special problems of legitimation vis-à-vis both outsiders and insiders.”51 The outsiders have to be kept out and the insiders have to be kept in. We frame this debate by either telling stories that are distinctly legal or, instead, telling stories that are somewhat larger. This debate about autonomy illustrates the observation of Roger Friedland and Robert Alford that “individuals can manipulate or reinterpret symbols and practices.”52 Those who introduced economics and philosophy into legal discourse did so consciously, with the intent of expanding the “subuniverse.” This change was not, however, merely incidental. When the practices and symbols of an institution are altered, it is with the intent of achieving specific goals. As Friedland and Alford have stated, “institutional transformations are . . . associated with the creation of both new social relationships and new symbolic orders. Social revolutions, for example, restructure both the organizational relationships between the state and society, and the symbolic order of the society.”53 Since reinterpreting the practices, symbols and relationships of society is revolutionary in nature, it makes sense that those who seek social change will do so through telling different stories about social meaning. When altered stories gain acceptance, becoming the official reality, a new universe of meaning has been socially constructed. Progressivism, seeking to change the existing order, tells stories that reinterpret society’s practices, symbols and relationships. But this process, itself, conforms to the familiar norms of culture by using established narrative structures. Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey have noted three elements essential to any narrative: first, a “selective appropriation of past events and characters;” second, a temporal ordering that presents these events with a beginning, a middle and an end; and third, an overarching structure that contextualizes these events as part of an opposition or struggle.54 The conscious design of this narrative process, its teleological nature, inevitably leads us toward the storyteller’s objective. That is why Hayden White observed that some historical representations fail to sum up the meaning of a given chain of events and, thus, lack an essential feature of narrativity--closure. This demand for narrative closure is, according to White, “a demand . . . for moral meaning.”55 But the meanings of various narratives must be conveyed in comprehensible forms. After all, the point is to convey meaning by imposing a narrative structure but this goal is subverted by speaking, as it were, in a foreign tongue. The familiarity of narratives, the extent to which they effectively convey their message, reflects the extent to which these narratives follow established patterns. Indeed, if narratives are “socially organized phenomena which, accordingly, reflect the cultural and structural features of their production,”56 then it makes sense that narratives would follow culturally established patterns. These patterns would be diffused across the spectrum of social interactions, reflecting the taken-for-granted assumptions of everyday life and persistently recurring in literature, cinema and television as well as among lawyers, unions and gangs. In The Secular Scripture, Northop Frye outlines such a pattern, a “mythological universe” through which society expresses its “vision of reality.”57 This universe is, according to Frye, a “verbal culture” of myths and folktales; the myths tell the culture who it is and how it came to be--scriptural--while the folktales exist on the periphery, fulfilling a more “imaginative” purpose--secular.58 But, according to Frye, when the mythical structure is increasingly exposed as “a construct,” the imaginative narratives themselves begin to form an authoritative universe of meaning.59 Thus the “secession of science from mythology” ultimately led “secular stories [to form] a single integrated vision of the world, parallel to the Christian and biblical universe.”60 Fry’s “secular scripture” consists of imaginative stories that carry the authority once accorded to myth, stories that reflect the “ascendant values” of a given society.61 “Romance,” he observed, “being directly descended from folktale, . . . brings us closer than any other aspect of literature to the sense of fiction . . . as the epic of the creature, man’s vision of his own life as a quest.”62 The conventions of romance thus provide a framework for instruction about what is and is not worthwhile to pursue in one’s quest. Frye outlined these conventions in great detail, but the general pattern, rather than specific literary mannerisms, makes Frye’s analysis relevant here.63 This pattern consists of formulaic units of storytelling, “archetypes” in Frye’s lexicon, that are adapted to the real world by a process he calls “displacement.”64 According to Frye, a displaced myth is rationalized to appear sensible, even realistic, by placing the formulaic elements into a credible context; thus, “the more undisplaced the story, the more sharply the design stands out.”65 But even within a more believable frame of reference, these stories closely track their conventions.66 Romance narratives build on a “story [that] proceeds toward an end which echoes the beginning, but echoes it in a different world.”67 That is to say, romance moves between the realistic world as it is and the romantic conception of the world as it should be. It “split[s] into heroes and villains . . . avoid[ing] the ambiguities of ordinary life, where everything is a mixture of good and bad, and where it is difficult to take sides or believe that people are consistent patterns of virtue or vice.”68 Romance inevitably takes sides--polarizing between the nightmare world of illusion and the idyllic world of reality; romance narratives lead from illusion, a state of alienation, to reality, the recovery of identity.69 Hence, Frye noted that “most romances exhibit a cyclical movement of descent into a night world and a return to the idyllic world, or some symbol of it. . . .”70 This cycle is a quest to restore that which has been lost, a journey to regain one’s identity. The heroes and heroines of romance commence this quest in a world of violence and fraud. Frye observed that “the tragic hero is normally a person capable of being an agent and not merely a victim of violence, but tragedy is mainly a form in which an actual or potential agent of violence becomes a victim of it.”71 The comic story, on the other hand, concerns guile and craft—fraud—and its themes often include disguise and concealment.72 Whether tragic or comic, these heroes and heroines seek to avoid what Frye termed “the one fate that really is worse than death, the annihilation of one’s identity.”73 Frye argued that the conventions of romance place these heroes and heroines in a universe that consists of a middle earth, with a revelatory sky above and a mysterious place of birth and death beneath.74 Thus, according to Frye, there are “four primary narrative movements in literature:” the descent from a higher world, the descent to a lower world, the ascent from a lower world, and the ascent to a higher world.75 Themes of descent involve upheavals in the rightful order, changes in consciousness or social status that serve as metaphors for the loss of identity.76 In the lower world “the central figure is not only a prisoner and accused, but he himself knows nothing and yet is known,” whereas the upper world “is essentially a form of revelation or full knowledge.”77 Themes of ascent are characterized by “escape [from the under world] through a shift of identity.”78 For Frye, this escape involves recognizing the “demonic” nature of the “perverted order” established in the lower world and separating from it.79 This is the progressive dimension of romance for, as Frye noted, “revolutionary ideas are dialectical and polarizing . . ., and this involves, in romance, the identifying of the demonic or regressive and its clear separation from whatever is progressive in the story.”80 Such recognition leads to a restoration of “the broken current of memory” and a return to the beginning of the story in order to “interpret it more truly than the previous account has done.”81 Reinterpretation, with added insight, is the goal of any consciously designed narrative. And the ascent triggered by restored memory leads the hero or heroine toward the ultimate reinterpretation--the recovery of original identity; the quest terminates in an edenic state, where the cyclical tale began.82 This cycle seems to repeat across the spectrum of our culture, ordering the narrative structures we use to make meaning. But the objective of such social mythology, Frye noted, is transcendence--not in the sense of repudiation, but “rather an individual recreation of the mythology, a transforming of it from accepted social values into the axioms of one’s own activity.”83 Indeed, this reflects what Frye called the “wish-fulfillment element in romance;” a desire to recreate the past and bring it into the present while simultaneously bringing something potential or possible from the future.84 Romance narratives strive to reorder the world, reinterpreting the past and predicting the future in order to tell us who we really are. The curious embrace of Report from Iron Mountain illustrates the power of social mythology. Leonard Lewin’s hoax tracks the conventions of romance narration, and a closer look at the book illuminates Frye’s structure. In an introduction to Report from Iron Mountain, Lewin contextualized the report, documenting how this John Doe, a professor at a large mid-western university, contacted Lewin, arranged a lunch meeting, and nervously discussed “freedom of information.”85 Doe had been recruited to serve on a government commission that would meet at Iron Mountain, New York: Iron Mountain, located near the town of Hudson, is like something out of Ian Fleming or E. Phillips Oppenheim. It is an underground nuclear hideout for hundreds of American corporations. Most of them use it as an emergency storage vault for important documents. But a number of them maintain substitute corporate headquarters as well, where essential personnel could presumably survive and continue to work after an attack.86The imagery of descent is overt and accentuates the menacing presence of corporate headquarters, designed to survive the attack that kills the rest of us. It is a nightmare world of corrupted social power. The special study group descended into Iron Mountain—the core of the military/industrial complex—to work for two and a half years and subsequently submitted its report. But the special study group, and the government agency that commissioned it, suppressed the report, and according to Lewin, “after months of agonizing, Doe had decided that he would no longer be party to keeping it secret.” There was no obligation to keep the results secret, but “so far as [Doe] was concerned, there was such a thing as a public right to know what was being done on its behalf.”87 In fact, Doe recited his personal, moral obligations in a brief statement: “I am well aware that my action may be taken as a breach of faith by some of my former colleagues. But in my view my responsibility to the society of which I am a part supersedes any self-assumed obligation on the part of fifteen individual men.”88 Thus Doe defied the all-powerful forces of government, risking the condemnation of his profession, and placing the public good above his own self-interest. He became, in a word, a hero--even if his heroism was nothing more than the inevitable act of a stock character. Doe confronted the fraudulent actions of powerful institutions—governments and corporations—and accomplished the objectives of his quest by leaking the report. His journey began when he descended—accepted the invitation to prepare the report—into Iron Mountain, but it ultimately led to his separation from the sinister forces of the military/industrial complex. Disclosing the true nature of a militaristic America is Doe’s act of recovery. He discovers that he is not one of them. But Doe’s act also forces us to decide whether we want to be part of a society that has fallen into the nightmare world. In the report itself, the special study group stated that it was charged to study “the broad problems to be anticipated in the event of a general transformation of American society to a condition lacking its most critical current characteristics: its capability and readiness to make war when doing so is judged necessary or desirable by its political leadership.”89 After observing that it would be incorrect to assume that “war, as an institution, is subordinate to the social systems it is believed to serve,”90 the report argued that: although war is ‘used’ as an instrument of national and social policy, the fact that a society is organized for any degree of readiness for war supersedes its political and economic structure. War itself is the basic social system, within which other secondary modes of social organization conflict or conspire. It is the system which has governed most human societies of record, as it is today.91 The report backed this assertion with arguments that war is “the only balance wheel with sufficient inertia to stabilize the advance of [modern industrial] economies;”92 that “the organization of a society for the possibility of war is its principal political stabilizer;”93 that “military institutions . . . provide anti-social elements with an acceptable role in the social structure” and, further, this “war system provides the basic motivation for primary social organization;”94 that war serves an ecological purpose of reducing the “consuming population” and a new “quasi-eugenic function of war” is growing;95 and, finally, that cultural and scientific advancement depends heavily upon the war system.96 The report truly presents a nightmare vision of a society hopelessly entangled with the machinery of death, unable to separate itself because the cost would be economic, political, sociological, ecological and scientific chaos. But the demonic imagery of Report from Iron Mountain only increases with the presentation of potential substitutes for these functions of war. Because it is a nightmare, the report provides no answers a reader could live with. For the economic function, it posits either an elaborate social services framework--the report, not surprisingly concluded this would be too cheap to fulfill the economic role of war--or a massive space program.97 Political functions could be assumed by a World Court or United Nations, a well armed force vested with real authority.98 Of course, this is the militia movement’s greatest fear, an external sovereign with little regard for Constitutional--especially Second Amendment--rights. Perhaps the most menacing vision of the nightmare world comes from the report’s suggestions for sociological war-substitutes. “Consistent with modern technology and political processes,” a form of slavery could be reintroduced “for the control of potential enemies of society.”99 Further, “blood games” could be introduced for “the effective control of individual aggressive impulses.”100 The ecological function of war could be supplanted by mechanisms of “eugenic management,” limitations on procreation outside government control, possibly through the introduction of contraceptives in water or food supplies.101 Finally, the scientific purposes of war could be accomplished through the partial solutions mentioned above--massive programs in space exploration, social welfare, or eugenic management.102 With these conclusions in mind, it is not difficult to see the report as a depiction of the nightmare world. After all, Frye noted that at the bottom of this night world, romance commonly uses the “cannibal feast,” “the serving up of a child or lover as food,” to represent the depths of the narrative’s demonic threat.103 Blood sports, slavery and eugenic management present a similar spectacle of inhuman behavior, representing the depths of conspiracy and collusion among the powerful. The point of telling the story, however, is not just to document Doe’s heroism in rejecting this world; it is to encourage readers to make a similar rejection of their own nightmare worlds. Lewin hoped his 60’s readers would look beneath the surface of social events, distrust the establishment, and take steps toward changing the system. It is mildly disconcerting to Lewin and many others that his 90’s readers are following this script exactly. The difference is that Lewin’s book lacks the narrative context, the frame of reference, that provided much of its meaning thirty years ago. Works of fiction can supply the entire structure relevant to a narrative’s interpretation, but other forms of social mythology often ask us to fill in the missing pieces. Lewin’s work falls somewhere between these extremes, providing an introduction that contextualizes the report in terms of Doe’s heroism, but failing to preempt the interpretations of white separatists and patriot militiamen. Most often, the various forms of social mythology require a context for their interpretation. Lacking the fuller frame of reference that surrounds a literary narrative, they provide one element of the story--a descent into the nightmare world or an ascent to full knowledge--and rely on cultural associations to fill in the missing material. Curiously, it is this cultural context that romance seeks to alter, socially constructing the culture within which readers, listeners and observers infuse narratives with moral meaning. But dissonance sometimes builds within this network of progressive associations. A proposition accepted as infinitely progressive during one period may be assailed as apologetic in the next, reflecting a shift in how the community of progressives values particular knowledge. These shifts become contested territory, clashes between the official and the heretical. And, in order to solidify their institutional power, both sides in this debate tell stories that “legitimate” their versions of reality. Viewing the community of progressives as an institution, then, it makes perfect sense that the content of progressive aspiration will be contested territory. This section first explores progressivism’s paradigmatic shift away from religious authority, asserting that this transformation has resulted in a certain dissonance--reliance upon assumptions that progressivism simultaneously seeks to undermine. Second, this section presents contemporary progressive narratives as attempts to resolve this dissonance, arguments about the nature of individual identity and thus the proper aspiration of progressivism. The Contested Territory of Progressivism Shifts in fundamental assumptions occur in every community, but the temptation to chart progressivism as a series of complete upheavals should be avoided. Such transitions operate by synthesis, selectively incorporating the past into a new framework, rather than by upheaval, implying complete rejection of the past. Thus, the progressives of the 1990s, just like progressives a century earlier, aspire to a society structured around fairness, equality and justice, having inherited this vision of ascent to a better world from earlier generations. These progressive values implicitly rely on normative assumptions to provide their content. Without this foundation of cultural meaning, they work as vacuous slogans capable of sanctioning any action taken by those who control the rhetoric. Though an uncomfortable conclusion, it seems inevitable when one considers the tortured history of equality in twentieth-century America. Some amalgam of cultural assumptions convinces us that certain practices—often those practices formerly sanctioned by society or law—are inherently unjust, unequal and unfair. But the source, and thus content, of this amalgam remains somewhat uncertain. The words themselves are empty shells. In the progressivism of this century’s first decades, these assumptions, or morals, were derived from explicitly religious sources. Indeed, Eldon Eisenach observed that the principal authors of Progressive doctrine were “not only Protestant, but overwhelmingly evangelical Protestant in family background.”104 In fact, Eisenach wrote, “their homogeneity is even greater than a most paranoid WASP-conspiracy theorist would have any right to expect.”105 Building on the abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century, these progressives formed a powerful political movement that centered around religiously-grounded morality. “From the beginning of their movement,” wrote James McPherson, “abolitionists had insisted that black people were equal to whites in the sight of God and equally entitled to liberty in this world.”106 From these roots, progressivism blossomed into a reform movement focused on “moral uplift.”107 This movement incorporated elements such as prohibition and immigration restriction that would seem irrelevant—if not repugnant—to later progressives,108 along with elements such as desires to curb the “evil” of monopoly and the excesses of business that would continue to form the center of progressive thought in later decades.109 More importantly, however, the movement affirmed the presence of absolutes upon which public policy could be based. These absolutes were largely grounded in what has been called the “de facto Protestant establishment.”110 This “curious meld of religion and government” in nineteenth century America functioned through the twin assumptions that, first, “Protestant Christianity is one of the pillars of a well-ordered society” and, second, “government properly may act to encourage belief in this version of Christianity.”111 With these assumptions as foundation, it is easy to see how abolitionists could invoke religious argument in their crusade against slavery and how progressives, at their height, could believe that “no scourge . . . would not eventually yield to reason and goodness.”112 For these progressives, reason clearly was goodness. Writing during World War II, but in the spirit of an earlier generation of progressives, C. S. Lewis observed that attempts to analyze social morality in terms of the Christian imperative to “do as you would be done by” ultimately lead inward, “from social matters to religious matters.”113 Indeed, for Lewis, the need to ground one’s inward morality in absolutes necessitates the following evaluation: “if your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazi’s less true, there must be something--some Real Morality--for them to be true about.”114 This insistence upon a foundation, a “real morality,” serves as progressivism’s keystone. Not all progressives, of course, shared the same particular religion, but, after all, Tocqueville had observed in an earlier generation that “there is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America.”115 Of course, much has changed since Tocqueville’s travels and such categorical assertions distort the complexities of historical movements, but influential early progressives such as John Dewey evidence the lingering influence of their religious backgrounds. Dewey, a tremendously influential figure in this century’s intellectual and political history, articulated a progressive, democratic theory in first the language of religion and later the language of science. But Andrew Feffer has argued that “it would be a mistake to consider this transition [from explicitly theological language to exclusively social and psychological discourse] a complete repudiation of the idealist theology in which [Dewey] was versed as a young man.”116 Feffer observed that Dewey’s mature work followed patterns set in his earlier attempts to shore up religious faith with philosophical idealism, particularly with regard to “idealist notions of self, self-realization, [and] the immanence of the spiritual in the real and the mental in the physical.”117 For Dewey, like American progressivism, it appears that while the language may have become less overtly religious, the core conceptions of individual identity remained close to their theological roots. At its zenith, the progressive movement sought to fully incorporate a moral vision largely derived from its Protestant background into America’s social policy. In 1914, the year of their greatest political prominence, progressives sought, on the authority of this moral vision, institutional changes in politics to open the democratic process and structural changes in the economy to eliminate cruel excesses of capitalism.118 They sought, in essence, equality, fairness and justice. And progressives of the 1990s still seek these objectives, implicitly relying on a foundation of thought, however, that has been largely discredited among the intellectual elite. After all, several hundred years of intellectual effort have steadily chipped away at religion and its status as social authority. During the late nineteenth century, the rise of modernism posited science and naturalism as alternate authorities. Gradually, fundamental assumptions—first among the educated elites and eventually among the masses—shifted away from the spiritual absolutism of Protestant Christianity to the mechanistic absolutism of scientific naturalism. Although religion remains culturally vibrant in American life, religiously-grounded epistemologies are nonetheless marginalized in the face of modernist naturalism. Arguments that incorporate some notion of reality--the nature of life and individual identity—must increasingly be derived from science to be taken seriously.119 Speaking of religiously-centered progressivism’s ebb, William Leuchtenburg observed that “in the years from 1914 to 1932, intellectuals led an assault on the groups which had traditionally exercised moral authority.”120 The result was a transition to scientific authority and eventually an outright rejection of the prior era’s foundational assumptions. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the social sciences rose “to cultural dominance.”121 In the spirit of a new age, progressive legal thinkers argued that “law [was] no longer anything sacred or mysterious”122 and advocated the application of “wise social engineering.”123 This sociological jurisprudence urged the application of social science to the existing structures of law whereas, several decades later, the legal realists expressed distrust for the actual structures themselves.124 In perhaps the most radical expression of realism, Thurman Arnold observed that the shift to view law as ensconced in the aura of science “means only that the earliest conception that the law came from God and the later conception that it arose from logic and reason have both been worn thin.”125 For Arnold, perhaps the most cynical of the legal realists, science was only the most recent source of authority, not the final and absolute source. Arnold was decades ahead of his time, however, because most realists, indeed most people during the thirties, placed enormous faith in the power of science to solve society’s woes and thus serve as the ultimate source of progressive authority. The New Deal—a response to exigent circumstances that took shape under the influence of the prevailing legal realist culture—built its structure on the foundation of modernity and science. Regulation and management were watchwords but morality was not. The twenties were, according to William Leuchtenburg, “a time of transition within progressivism from the old-style evangelical reformism . . . to a new-style urban progressivism, which would call itself liberalism” and be “less interested in moral reformation and more in using the power of the federal government to provide specific economic benefits.”126 The New Deal became a vehicle to provide these benefits without any undue moral affectation. Leuchtenburg wryly observed that “while the progressives grieved over the fate of a prostitute, the New Dealer would have placed Mrs. Warren’s profession under a code authority.”127 Viewing the New Deal as mere regulation, however, ignores the latent morality that, in fact, fueled its normative content. Value-laden determinations about the wisdom of particular initiatives—collective bargaining and securities regulation, for example—gave shape to the progressive law of the late thirties just as such determinations had given shape to the progressive movement in the teens. The New Dealers sought to foster fairness, equality and justice in American society, though their justifications for the endeavor tracked the rhetorics of science instead of theology. As Leuchtenburg observed, “the New Dealers inwardly recognized that what they were doing had a deeply moral significance however much they eschewed ethical pretensions.”128 During the thirties, the crisis of economic depression and the resulting enactment of the New Deal resulted in a “massive reordering of the American economy and society.”129 Emergency measures were taken in accordance with progressivism’s normative rhetoric of fairness, equality and justice, but these measures were justified and carried out with the machinery of social science. Since the relativism typified by Thurman Arnold hardly fuels social agendas, progressives of the postwar era sought a unifying, foundational justification for the New Deal’s normative content. Post-war legal thinkers buried progressivism’s implicit morality beneath layers of legal procedure and mechanistic reasoning. The legal process school, generally associated with Henry Hart and Albert Sacks, espoused the belief that “system” could provide authority. They located normative, moral content in stare decisis, reasonableness and rationality. These values were exemplified in what they called “the technique of reasoned elaboration.”130 While stressing the competence and legitimacy of decisionmakers, this proceduralist approach emphasized that “underlying every rule and standard . . . is at the least a policy and in most cases a principle. This principle or policy is always available to guide judgment in resolving uncertainties about the arrangement’s meaning.”131 But what if the policy does not resolve doubts about a rule’s legitimacy? Then, the process school argued, “doubts about the purposes of particular statutes or decisional doctrines . . . must be resolved, if possible, so as to harmonize them with more general principles and policies.”132 This was, essentially, reasoned elaboration—harmonizing difficult issues to fit with abstract, generalized policies. Obviously, the process school assumed a great deal of social consensus and placed its faith in elaborate procedures that would ensure the continuation of consensus-based policies. At the height of proceduralism, in a time when years of post-war economic prosperity made Americans believe that almost anything was possible, the New Deal agenda was both expanded and entrenched in a series of federal enactments generally associated with Johnson’s Great Society. The rhetoric of progressivism triumphed in the Civil Rights Act’s promise of equality, in the Voting Rights Act’s promise of fairness, and in a series of social welfare enactments that promised social justice. But proceduralism, like science, offered a method without any independent, substantive content. Reasoned elaboration presupposes a moral framework within which reason and elaboration take place. It does not offer the content of that framework. The progressive agenda that had been built on religious faith in the early decades of this century found itself justified by science during the New Deal and proceduralism during the post-war era. Science and proceduralism, as methods rather than substantive theories, however, fail to produce authoritative, normative values. During the sixties and seventies another rhetoric, one grounded in a kind of nouvea natural law, developed in the works of John Rawls133 and Ronald Dworkin.134 For these thinkers, moral philosophy provides an authoritative, substantive foundation for progressive rhetoric. Dworkin argued that the content of moral philosophy can be discerned through a detached, neutral observation of society that leads an individual to discern what “society’s public commitments to principle” will in turn “require in new circumstances.”135 Integrity to these principles forms the foundational justification for law inasmuch as “a general commitment to integrity expresses a concern by each for all that is sufficiently special, personal, pervasive, and egalitarian to ground communal obligations according to standards for communal obligations we elsewhere accept.”136 This concern of “each for all” sounds remarkably like C.S. Lewis’ Christian imperative to “do as you would be done by.” The distinction, however, turns on authority; Lewis’ rhetoric builds on a foundation of faith whereas Dworkin’s rhetoric seeks justification in human reason. Though one could not argue that progressives achieved cultural consensus in prior eras, the unrighteousness of slavery or the injustice of economic domination constituted, at a minimum, the progressive zeitgeist and, at a maximum, the “enlightened” view of the majority. Both turn-of-the-century progressive rhetoric and Dworkin’s model of “each for all” build upon this set of assumptions about human nature — the belief that humans must learn to peacefully coexist by fostering mutual respect, decency and regard for the rights of others. Without these presuppositions, Dworkin’s “principles” will turn out substantially different than he would like. The naturalistic foundation of modernism, however, makes no such presuppositions. Science—in its harsh simplicity—tells us nothing about decency, only survival of the fittest.137 During our century, the rhetorics of science and modernism have been ascendant, vying for cultural supremacy with previously-dominant rhetorics grounded in religious faith. These shifts in fundamental cultural beliefs are further facilitated by modern technology. The dissemination of information on a level never before possible—mass media socialization—leads toward a shared cultural consensus, but not necessarily the consensus that Dworkin envisions. When scientific naturalism forms a nearly indisputable cultural paradigm, Dworkin’s egalitarianism finds little justification. If the urge to think in terms of “each for all” arises from preferences that exist on the periphery of a scientifically-oriented core, then the preference will rule so long as--to put it in economic terms--the cost is not too high. If the cost is too high and, for example, “each for all” demands that some in society sacrifice for the benefit of others, then mere preferences will fail to overrule the core demands of self-interest, and egalitarianism goes out the window. Dworkin’s progressive rhetoric subtly clashes with the underpinnings of modernism because—in the close cases—the naturalistic view of the world inherent to modernism privileges survival and self-interest, not egalitarianism. Modernist rhetoric subtly urges each individual to believe that there is no transcendent merit to self-sacrifice. Thinking in egalitarian terms is, thus, relegated to situations where there is little at stake. In a world premised on naturalistic assumptions, progressivism holds up only so long as it is not scrutinized too closely. The inability to ground fairness, equality and justice on anything more solid than preference leaves progressives aspiring to ideals that our culture subtly undermines. This gap between progressive aspirations and cultural assumptions generates a certain dissonance, a disconnect between the morally-based ideals of progressivism and the socially-constructed world of social Darwinism. The task of progressive narratives, as a result, is to resolve this dissonance by creating a world where moral imperatives are clearly justified--a universe of meaning where fairness, equality and justice are not mere decoration, but instead foundational principles. The Content of Progressive Aspiration The objective, then, of progressive stories is to provide a foundation that makes striving worthwhile. The progressives of this century’s earlier decades have used religion, science and philosophy to build such foundations, but it seems that each of these “institutional subuniverses” eventually erodes. Their stories only forestall the inevitable collapse, never creating a citadel completely safe from decay. That explains why progressive stories are told over and over; they shore up the increasingly vulnerable progressive world.138 The content of these recurring stories illuminates progressivism’s foundation--a foundation that has not changed as much as one might suspect. Even after a century, to be progressive is still to advocate fairness, equality and justice. After all, progressivism has always been a project of moral suasion. To accomplish its ends, progressivism tells people who they really are. Just as with Frye’s analysis of romance, recurring progressive stories ultimately reveal identity. When individuals discover their true identity, they know what to do next. If their true identity is that of God’s child, then benevolence to others—doing as you would be done by--makes perfect sense. When one’s true identity is somewhat more complicated—organic mechanism that ought to behave as God’s child because science or philosophy compels it--then the stories of identity are more complicated, but they still suggest some course of action. These stories retain the normative structure descended from nineteenth century Protestantism, but they also include components of identity derived from contemporary authorities: from one’s status in a capitalist society, from one’s relationships arising from gender, or from highly developed conceptions of race. That is, a network of associations grows from this narrative of identity, creating an evil, nightmare world and a source of potential redemption. Narratives of identity, of course, are really arguments about culture because the content of progressive aspiration is, in the end, defined by culture--a socially constructed reality. When a culture begins to doubt the authority of myth or religion, progressive thought looks elsewhere for its authority. Defining a particular culture, then, is the objective of progressive effort. A stark example of this appeared several years ago in The Atlantic Monthly.139 Lawrence Harrison, an American diplomat formerly stationed in Haiti, outlined the political and economic problems of that nation, concluding that “Haitian progress depends above all on changing the way the Haitian people see themselves, their neighbors, their society, their world.”140 According to Harrison, this nation of illiterate, poverty-stricken people living under “a virtually unbroken chain of brutal and corrupt leaders” has been victimized not by American imperialism, but by “the values and attitudes of the average Haitian.” These values and attitudes, he argued, have been “profoundly influenced by traditional African culture, particularly the voodoo religion, and by slavery under the French, which lasted from the second half of the seventeenth century through much of the eighteenth.”141 Voodoo, or Vodun as it is known to most scholars, is, according to the author, “little concerned with progress,” instead focusing on a pantheon of hundreds of spirits called Loa.142 Vodun ceremonies and rituals--including animal sacrifice--are attempts to propitiate the Loa, while opportunities of any kind are delivered to individuals by the Loa. Notions of individual responsibility are, as a result, limited to acting on these opportunities; the notion that personal morality should mitigate self-interest plays no role in the calculus.143 As a result, when one can become a dictator and a despot, one does, without hesitation; when one can overthrow the democratically-elected president and seize power, one does, without remorse; and when one can lynch political enemies with burning tires around their necks, one does, because the opportunity was facilitated by the Loa.144 According to Harrison, these cultural problems are exacerbated by the island’s history of slavery. The wages of slavery are well documented; Harrison observed that it “teaches abusive authoritarianism,” “inculcates pessimism and antisocial attitudes,” “reinforces the zero-sum world view,” and “undermines the sense of community.”145 Culture and slavery have combined, according to the author, to relegate Haiti to its station as one of the poorest 25 nations on earth. Harrison argued that Haiti’s solution could be found in the “transformations” of Japan, Turkey and Spain; these nations built on: the involvement of trained people who understand and are committed to modern norms of public administration, administration of justice, and business administration, together with leaders who have a vision of a modern society; heavy emphasis on universal education; the creation of a good university (nothing worthy of the name exists in Haiti); a movement away from religious orthodoxy and toward secularization, or at least a reformation of Vodun or a conversion of its followers to more progressive religions; the promotion of independent, professional communications media.146In short, he argued Haiti’s woes can disappear if they just learn to be like us. In fact, Harrison noted, the Haitian emigrants that have lived in the United States, Canada and France “have been exposed to the progressive values and institutions that largely explain the success of those societies” so, according to him, “real progress in Haiti” may depend on their return.147 As one can surmise from Harrison’s article, the boundaries of progressivism and 1990s political correctness are not coextensive. In fact, many contemporary progressives would attack his argument for blatantly trumpeting the superiority of “eurocentric” values.148 Progressives, however, always assert the superiority of their values--Harrison’s article just provides an unusually clear example. In the article, Harrison argues that most Haitians do not know who they are. They live in a nightmare world of Vodun, propitiating a non-existent cohort of spirits with the blood of chickens. If they could only “ascend” to our values, he seems to argue, their nightmare could end in a revelation of science, progress and self-knowledge. Harrison’s argument makes culture an overt question. Their culture denies Haitians the truth, he argues. Though others often brush over such explosive issues, they remain central to the task of persuasion. Harrison can make such assertions because he is not Haitian and the nightmare world he depicts is not his own. A more difficult, but perhaps more immediate, issue for American progressives is presented by the increasing problems of urban America. Progressives have engaged in a debate about the existence of an “underclass” beneath the structure of functioning society. The debate arose after Ken Auletta argued that “a surprising consensus” had developed between the left and the right “that America has developed an underclass.”149 According to Auletta, those on the right characterize this underclass as “pathological” while those on the left use terms such as “hopelessness” or “alienation.”150 Five years later, William Julius Wilson, a sociologist then affiliated with the University of Chicago, published The Truly Disadvantaged, a thorough analysis of “social dislocations” among inner-city residents that occur, according to Wilson, not because of “the easy explanation of racism,” but rather because of a “complex web of factors that include shifts in the economy . . . the historic flow of migrants, changes in the urban minority age structure, population changes in the central city, and the class transformation of the inner city.”151 Wilson’s materialist thesis raised a firestorm of opposition from both the right, that preferred to think in terms of the “culture of poverty,”152 and the left, that preferred to see any problem as an “incomplete extension of the welfare state.”153 Wilson’s critics also assailed his light treatment of race, arguing, for example, that his analysis of socio-economic dislocations, like other theories of education and employment discrimination, failed to consider the residential segregation “relevant to understanding the underclass or alleviating urban poverty.”154 This debate underscores the schisms inherent to contemporary progressive discourse. In the face of arguments about the “culture of poverty” or the “perverse incentives of welfare assistance,” some progressives reply with discussions of the “incomplete extension of the welfare state” or the “disproportionate effects of changes in the international economy on the core areas of cities.”155 These materialist arguments, in turn, come under attack by other progressives for failing to emphasize the role of racial discrimination156 or for failing to highlight issues of race and class instead of race and economics, thus casting the dislocations of the seventies as “beyond the scope of social intervention.”157 The first wave of progressive rhetoric relies upon the implicit authority of thoroughly reasoned social science--a modernist narrative--while the second wave implicitly doubts that such discourse can reach the subjective, diffuse problems of society--a postmodern narrative. The second, postmodern narrative tends to undermine and discredit the first, resulting in the dissonance that limits the possibility of building coalitions, forming agendas and achieving progressive change. This dissonance follows from conflicting visions of individual identity that divide progressives into increasingly discrete groups. The underclass debate highlights this division. Derrick Bell has questioned Wilson’s thesis of structural, economic causes and, instead, argued that persistent racism seals the fate of the inner city.158 Other critics question the composition of the underclass debate by pointing out who is excluded. Some question why Hispanics are not included in the debate.159 Of course, certain groups of Asian-Americans face extreme difficulties in contemporary America, as do whites in Appalachia and, most silently, Native Americans living on long-forgotten reservations. Their stories are equally tragic, but the rhetoric, the way of talking about the problem, divides groups into ever smaller constituencies instead of uniting them in similarity. In the same way, much of the current rhetoric of race inevitably divides those it ostensibly seeks to unite. Typical of this type of discourse, Reginald Robinson recently stated that “white Americans are profoundly racist and harbor an unacknowledged commitment in whole or in part to some notion of white supremacy.”160 According to Robinson, some Americans justify their open hostility with stereotypes about blacks while “most white Americans are unconsciously hostile to blacks” and, though they might “fashion themselves as liberals,” they “continue to promote the underlying message of the master narrative of black inferiority, while wishing that America was not prejudiced against blacks.”161 Robinson cites psychological studies as authority for these sweeping assertions, but some would probably just cite the world around us as authority. The problem with Robinson’s point is not its substantive merit; the problem is that a point like his can only alienate all those indicted by its sweeping assertion. When progressive narratives do not poke people in the eye as much as reach out a hand, they are much more likely to lead somewhere. That is because social change is the inevitable objective of progressive narratives and, to effect such change in a democracy, a movement needs a broad base of support. But the political foundation of progressivism wanes in the face of increasingly subjective views of individual identity. For those who, like Harrison, conceptualize social breakdown as cultural pathology, the underclass debate presents a nightmare world of dysfunction. In this narrative, the individual must confront the evil within, the pathology that has transformed one’s own culture into a perverted order. Only when the individual comes face to face with this truth, acknowledging the failure of the old way of seeing things and embracing the new, can the individual learn who he or she is. For Harrison, the Haitians must learn to see themselves in the light of America, Canada and France by internalizing--in Frye’s language, transcending--the myths of these nations. When they have thus “recovered” their identity, the Haitian’s world will be returned to its rightful order because individuals will know who they are. They will realize that they are autonomous individuals, acting independent of the Loa and responsible for their own deeds. Because of this newly-gained self-knowledge, they will build a society structured around principles of, not surprisingly, fairness, equality and justice For Wilson and others of a materialist slant, the individual is an economic actor, exercising free will in a sense derived from American Protestantism. This individual now resides in a realm of “social dislocations,” a nightmare world of the underclass. When the individual learns that forces within society’s structure--not abstract forces beyond control--have caused these dislocations, then the individual can learn to manipulate these forces in order to change the social system. The key to redemption is, thus, knowledge of one’s free will; from this flows economic power and, eventually, societal transformation. For Robinson and those who reify racial difference into the single ordering principle of human interaction, the nightmare world manifests itself in omnipresent racial subjugation. White supremacy is a perverted order that all white Americans, according to Robinson, implicitly support, along with its corollary, the master narrative of black inferiority. Knowledge of these racial relationships, he argues, yields the true conception of individual identity, and this insight, Robinson hopes, leads the individual to renounce the nightmare world. Redemption, in this narrative, can only be found in complete rejection of a world structured around notions of white supremacy. Since he argues that these notions pervade American culture, Robinson seems to posit complete social upheaval as the only tenable solution. The implication is that redemption comes only through revolution. Progressive narratives fail to resolve progressivism’s implicit dissonance, because these narratives, themselves, build on increasingly subjective notions of individual identity. These narrower notions of identity constitute institutional subuniverses of meaning, being accessible only to those who belong to their smaller communities of interest. Critical race theorists fail to countenance the economists’ arguments who, in turn, fail to legitimate cultural critiques. This quandary leaves progressives aspiring to divergent forms of social change, telling stories of divergent heroes in conflicting quests. Sally Engle Merry recently responded to those who question the ability of progressives to articulate a coherent program of social change.162 After noting recent scholarship on the constitutive power of law to construct social and cultural life, Merry related the story of a Filipino immigrant living in Hawaii during the 1940s who refused medical attention for a two-year-old, self-inflicted hole in his hand. Arrested for purchasing sexual services from a minor, the man refused medical attention in jail because the hole was linked to his religious expression--a stigmata he kept open by regularly running a string through the wound--and symbolized, in Merry’s interpretation, a “moment of resistance to the categories of identity which undergirded the racialized hierarchy of the sugar plantation economy.”163 In Merry’s narrative, this hero defies the hierarchical world of power, achieving self-knowledge through his act of ascetic resistance. Merry cited two other progressive assertions of identity; changes in Hawaii’s spousal abuse laws that foster new gender relations and a native peoples tribunal that adjudicated the American acquisition of Hawaii.164 Taken together, however, these narratives subtly undermine one another. The Filipino man clearly resisted colonial authority, but his resistance was occasioned by predatory behavior toward a 14 year old girl. If one shifts filters to that of progressive gender relations, his act of resistance, was in fact overshadowed by his domination of a vulnerable victim. On the other hand, the immigrant’s resistance to colonial authority is meaningless if one shifts to the perspective of indigenous people. He is a victim of the colonists, but more importantly, he is himself a colonist. At this level, the Filipino immigrant’s culture is irrelevant, because the native Hawaiian culture constitutes the central paradigm. Any other set of cultural assumptions is foreign and thus irrelevant. The children of American colonists or Filipino immigrants do not get a voice in determining what is and is not valid behavior because the definition of indigenous--someone who arrived before the colonists or the immigrants--keeps them outside the debate. These subjective identities give certain individuals solid ground upon which they can build a progressive framework of thought. But the narrowly defined identities of contemporary progressivism limit the possibility that those outside the narrow group of interest will share the agenda. One might hope that progressives could be somewhat open-minded. But as Stanley Fish has observed, “to say that one’s mind should be open sounds fine until you realize that it is equivalent to saying that one’s mind should be empty of commitments, should be a purely formal device.”165 Assuming that a broad base of progressive factions can mold diverse individuals--with distinct notions of identity--into a cohesive whole is simply asking the framework of progressive thought to do something that, in the end, it cannot. Contemporary narratives of identity seek to resolve the questions of authority that plague progressivism, but they lack the power that religion once held. In an earlier era, progressives could unite behind an over-arching paradigm that commanded them to “do as they would be done by.”166 Since widely shared cultural assumptions fueled the progressive agenda of early decades, slavery was vanquished and monopolies were crushed. But increasingly subjective narratives of identity command obeisance only within narrow spheres, not translating easily into the realities of other social worlds. The interpretation of the world facilitated by these narrow identities--including a well-defined course of future action--is accessible only to those who share their cultural assumptions. This interpretation may, in fact, challenge the social worlds established by other progressives. In the end, it seems that progressive narratives, like Frye’s romances, end where they began, but with a difference.167 Questions of authority and feelings of dissonance remain in the larger progressivism, but those who gain new identities now live in temporary worlds of absolutes. Ultimately, each of these progressive stories of corrupted power, treacherous betrayal and potential redemption becomes, like Iron Mountain, an archetype. That narrative’s ready-built formula--derived from the pattern of romance outlined by Northrop Frye--easily adapts to other contexts, rendering them predictable and familiar. Once the broad outlines of the romance narrative become clear, assuming a customary position within its polarized boundaries is a natural reaction. Perhaps, in the end, this is the inherited legacy of American progressives. When one self-identifies with the movement, then one’s reactions to its narratives are already scripted. With a few cues, the progressive knows when to be pleased, when to be outraged and when to mobilize for war. Progressives often portray themselves as outsiders, emphasizing their weak position in power relationships and their vulnerability to domination, but they often wield enormous power. By redefining individual identity, progressives have the power to set agendas in many contexts, especially academic and legal settings where progressives enjoy tremendous power and prestige.168 Social constructionism implies that powerful arguments eventually convince--that is, people come to believe they are who society tells them to be. Perhaps this was Northrop Frye’s point when he observed that “other scriptures tell us we are actors in a drama of divine creation and redemption,” but “the secular scripture tells us we are the creators.” We strive to create the world we want by telling stories about how we want the world to be. Progressive stories can change the world, however, only when their message is accessible and, perhaps, universal. When their conception of identity applies only to some, and alienates the rest, progressive stories are particularly telling. * J.S.D. Candidate, Stanford University; Associate, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Professional Corporation. Robert Gordon, Lawrence Friedman and Mark Suchman, among others, made helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. In addition, interactions with Eloise Bell, Larry Peer and Stanley Fish contributed to an interest in literature and society. To all of these individuals, and of course to Pamela, the author extends sincere appreciation. 1. Leonard C. Lewin, REPORT FROM IRON MOUNTAIN ON THE POSSIBILITY AND DESIRABILITY OF PEACE (1967). The act of ascribing authorship to Lewin in the citation in this footnote implies a political position. I regret disappointing a diverse cadre of committed conspiricists — from Oliver Stone to Timothy McVeigh — but it seems that Lewin deserves the credit. 2. See Robert Tomsho, A Cause for Fear: Though Called Hoax, ‘Iron Mountain’ Report Guides Some Militias, Wall St. J., May 5, 1995, at A1; Norman Oder, Free Press to Resurrect Leftist Sixties Hoax, Pub. Wkly., September 18, 1995, at 34. 3. See Victor S. Navasky, Anatomy of a Hoax, Nation, June 12, 1995, at 815. 4. See Tomsho, supra note 2, at A1. 5. Navasky, supra note 3, at 815 (quoting a 1972 article by Lewin in the New York Review of Books). 6. Id. Navasky’s collaborators were Richard Lingeman and Marvin Kitman. Their idea “was a simple one: Suppose the government had appointed a task force to plan the transition from a wartime economy and the task force concluded that we couldn’t afford it--that our entire economy was based on the preparation for war and that without this threat the economy would collapse. The report therefore was suppressed.” Id. 7. Id. Navasky’s writing is, arguably, somewhat pedantic and obfuscating. 8. Tomsho, supra note 2, at A1. 9. Id. The publisher was California’s Noontide Press, the purveyor of works such as “Six Million Lost and Found.” The Militia publication was “The Spotlight,” a weekly that features stories on U.N. Troop movements--i.e. within the United States--and other government plots against freedom. Id. 10. Id. 11. Tomsho, supra note 2, at A1. 12. Id. (quoting an Oklahoma Militiaman). The founder of the Idaho-based U.S. Militia Association observed that “a group of people got together and said ‘here is our blueprint for America.’ . . . It has caused a great deal of alarm.” Id. 13. Burt Rutan, designer of the Voyager aircraft that circumnavigated the earth without refueling in 1986, told a New York Times interviewer that those who view the report as a dark satire have “[fallen] for the disinformation story.” Andy Meisler, At Home with Burt Rutan; Slipping the Bonds of Earth and Sky, N.Y. Times, August 3, 1995, at C-1. 14. See Navasky, supra note 3, at 815. 15. See id. Of course, Iron Mountains ‘ premise that war is central to society and must continue to avoid economic and social chaos bears obvious similarities to Oliver Stone’s picture in which “Kennedy is assassinated by an elite group inside the government to stop the president from pulling out of Vietnam and thus end the Cold War. An idea straight from the pages of Iron Mountain.” All Things Considered: ‘Report from Iron Mountain’ A Hoax (National Public Radio Broadcast, August 18, 1995). 16. Id. It should be noted that Navasky publishes The Nation magazine and clearly wants to use the flap over Iron Mountain as a vehicle for free publicity. Iron Mountain, after all, grew out of the financial failure of Navasky’s Monacle, a satirical journal. Id. 17. Book Review, Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace, Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 1996 (reviewing the newly issued version of Iron Mountain forthcoming from the Free Press). 18. Oder, supra note 2, at 34. 19. Even in courses that focus on a narrow set of statutes such as Securities Regulation or Environmental Law, the emphasis clearly goes to judicial interpretations of these statutes. After all, “The Constitution [or the law] is what the judges say it is.” 20. Christopher Columbus Langdell, Preface to the First Edition, CASES ON CONTRACTS viii (1871). 21. Charles Fried, Jurisprudential Responses to Legal Realism, 73 Cornell L. Rev. 331 (1988). Fried cites to “a very interesting essay” by Posner on the autonomy of legal thought. Richard Posner, The Decline of Law as an Autonomous Discipline, 100 Harv. L. Rev. 761 (1987). 22. Id. at 333. Fried built on this observation by suggesting a more “modest” role for lawyers, one of “laboring in the basement of the building of society, doing really important work, while the great things that happen, happen up above in the upper stories, and . . . are done by entrepreneurs, by businessmen, by artists, by painters, by politicians, by poets, and by philosophers and economists, as well.” Fried further observed that “if [lawyers] would stay in the basement, doing something rather boring and technical . . . then we would be partially left alone, honored after a fashion and paid quite well.” Id. at 333-34. 23. Id. at 334. 24. Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann, THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY (1966, 1967). 25. Berger and Luckmann quite sensibly view knowledge as a “social product.” Id. at 87. 26. Id. at 67. The authors wisely perceive the limitations of their endeavor. Since they are sociologists, they write within a given framework of knowledge and understand that: to include epistemological questions concerning the validity of knowledge in the sociology of knowledge is somewhat like trying to push a bus in which one is riding.... [T]hese questions are not themselves part of the empirical discipline of sociology. They properly belong to the methodology of the social sciences, an enterprise that belongs to philosophy and is by definition other than sociology, which is indeed an object of its inquiries. Id. at 13.27. Id. at 57. 28. Id. at 93. 29. Id. at 94-95. 30. Id. at 98. 31. Id. at 149. “By playing roles, the individual participates in a social world. By internalizing these roles, the same world becomes subjectively real to him.” Id. at 74. 32. Id. at 106-07. 33. Id. at 133. 34. Id. at 129-37. 35. Id. at 138. 36. Id. at 132. 37. Of course, Berger and Luckmann cite to the authority of sociology’s foundational sources: Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber et al. Id. at 1-18. 38. See Walter W. Powell & Paul J. DiMaggio, Introduction, in Walter W. Powell & Paul J. DiMaggio (eds.), THE NEW INSTITUTIONALISM IN ORGANIZATIONAL ANALYSIS (1991)[hereinafter THE NEW INSTITUTIONALISM]. 39. John W. Meyer & Brian Rowan, Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony, in THE NEW INSTITUTIONALISM, supra note 38, at 41(citation omitted). 40. “The incorporation of institutionalized elements provides an account of activities that protects the organization from having its conduct questioned. The organization becomes, in a word, legitimate, and it uses its legitimacy to strengthen its support and secure its survival.” Id. at 50 (citations omitted). 41. Ronald L. Jepperson & John W. Meyer, The Public Order and the Construction of Formal Organizations, in THE NEW INSTITUTIONALISM, supra note 38, at 204, 227. 42. Berger & Luckmann, supra note 24, at 109. 43. John Gaventa, POWER AND POWERLESSNESS: QUIESCENCE AND REBELLION IN AN APPALACHIAN VALLEY 19 (1980). 44. Id. at 13-15. 45. Id. at 16. In his discussion of third dimensional power, Gaventa cites to Steven Lukes, POWER: A RADICAL VIEW (1974). 46. Stanley Fish, Short People Got No Reason to Live: Reading Irony, Daedalus, Winter 1983, at 175, 189. 47. See Stanley Fish, Working on the Chain Gang: Interpretation in the Law and in Literary Criticism, 9 Critical Inquiry 201, 211 (1982). 48. Id. 49. Of course, the universe of thought could be shaped by social construction to the extent that social constructionism makes perfect sense. This circularity might be more menacing if theories were more than specialized jargons that explain real-world processes. 50. See Berger & Luckmann, supra note 24, at 85-90. The authors observe that “socially segregated subuniverses of meaning. . . result from accentuations of role specialization to the point where role-specific knowledge becomes altogether esoteric as against the common stock of knowledge.” Id. at 85. 51. Id. at 87. 52. Roger Friedland & Robert R. Alford, Bringing Society Back In: Symbols, Practices, and Institutional Contradictions, THE NEW INSTITUTIONALISM, supra note 38, at 232, 254. The authors argued that: the meaning and relevance of symbols may be contested, even as they are shared. Individuals, groups, and organizations struggle to change social relations both within and between institutions. As they do so, they produce new truths, new models by which to understand themselves and their societies, as well as new forms of behavior and material practices. Id.53. Id. at 250. 54. Patricia Ewick & Susan S Silbey, Subversive Stories and Hegemonic Tales: Toward a Sociology of Narrative, 29 L. & Soc’y Rev. 197, 200 (1995). 55. Hayden White, THE CONTENT OF THE FORM (1987). 56. Ewick & Silbey, supra note 55, at 200. The authors followed the tradition of social constructionism outlined above and discussed narratives in terms of power relationships, but they also observed that narratives can enter into scholarship in three distinct ways: as the object of inquiry, the method of inquiry, or the product of inquiry. Id. at 201. 57. Northrop Frye, THE SECULAR SCRIPTURE 14 (1976). 58. Id. at 7-9. 59. Id. at 14-15. Frye observed that when one culture supersedes another, the shift in authority causes the old mythology to become a folktale--or as Frye terms it, Fabulous--in the new culture. Thus “classical mythology became fabulous, a branch of secular literature, in Christian times, and biblical mythology, as such, is rapidly becoming fabulous now.” Id. at 14. 60. Id. at 14-15. 61. “In every period of history certain ascendant values are accepted by society and are embodied in its serious literature. Usually this process includes some form of kidnapped romance, that is, romance formulas used to reflect certain ascendant religious or social ideals.” Id. at 29-30. 62. Id. at 15. 63. In perhaps his most widely cited work, Frye argued that four “aesthetic myths” recur in common narratives: romantic and ironic methods of storytelling; comic and tragic views of the world. Northrop Frye, ANATOMY OF CRITICISM 151-58 (1957). Frye’s framework has been used to analyze the aesthetics of legal theory, Robin West, Jurisprudence as Narrative: An Aesthetic Analysis of Modern Legal Theory, 60 N.Y.U.L. Rev. 145 (1985), and it has been used to study nineteenth century historical narratives, Hayden White, METAHISTORY: THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION IN NINETEENTH CENTURY EUROPE (1973). 64. Frye, supra note 58, at 36-37. 65. Id. at 38. “The realistic tendency moves in the direction of the representational and the displaced, the romantic tendency in the opposite direction, concentrating on the formulaic units of myth and metaphor.” Id. at 37. 66. As Frye argued: “We expect each game of chess to be different, but we do not want the conventions of the game itself to alter, or to see a chess game in which the bishops move in straight lines and the rooks diagonally.” Id. at 44. 67. Id. at 49. 68. Id. at 50. 69. Id. at 54-55. 70. Id. at 54. “Even in the most realistic stories there is usually some trace of a plunge downward at the beginning and a bounce upward at the end.” Id. 71. Id. at 66. 72. Id. at 68. 73. Id. at 86. 74. Id. at 97. 75. Id. 76. Id. at 102-05. “The themes of rash promise and of fatal curiosity, as when Pandora or Psyche open boxes that they should have left shut, are closely connected, implying as they do the collapse of the rightful order in the mind and the separation of consciousness from the proper rhythm of action.” Id. at 102. 77. Id. at 123. Frye’s structure, more fully stated outlines these themes as follows: The general theme of descent [is] that of a growing confusion of identity and of restrictions on action. There is a break in consciousness at the beginning, with analogies to falling asleep, followed by a descent into a lower world which is sometimes a world of cruelty and imprisonment, sometimes in an oracular cave. In the descent here is a growing isolation and immobility: charms and spells hold one motionless; human beings are turned into subhuman creatures, and made more mechanical in behavior; hero or heroine are trapped in labyrinths or prisons. The narrative themes and images of ascent are much the same in reverse, and the chief conceptions are those of escape, remembrance, or discovery of one’s real identity, growing freedom, and the breaking of enchantment. Id. at 129.78. Id. at 136. 79. Id. at 139, 145. 80. Id. at 139. 81. Id. at 145. 82. As Frye put it: “The closer romance comes to a world of original identity, the more clearly something of the symbolism of the garden of Eden reappears, with the social setting reduced to the love of individual men and women within an order of nature which has been reconciled to humanity.” Id. at 149. 83. Id. at 170. 84. Id. at 179. 85. Lewin, supra note 1, at vii-viii. 86. Id. at ix. 87. Id. at xiv. 88. Id. at xxxi. 89. Id. at 7. Of course, the group didn’t really exist, but as an element within the narrative, it seems sensible to refer to the group--and the report--as if they actually existed. 90. Id. at 28. 91. Id. at 29. The report expands on this premise:92. Id. at 35. 93. Id. at 39. 94. Id. at 41, 44. These sociological observations are, perhaps, most chilling. The report observed that “blood sacrifice” served the purpose in premodern societies “of maintaining a vestigial ‘earnest’ of the society’s capability and willingness to make war--i.e., kill and be killed--in the event that some mystical--i.e., unforeseen--circumstance were to give rise to the possibility.” The report observes that this “historical analogy serves as a reminder that a viable substitute for war as a social system cannot be a mere symbolic charade. It must involve real risk of real personal destruction, and on a scale with the size and complexity of modern social systems.” Id. at 46-47. 95. Id. at 50-51. 96. Id. at 51-54. 97. Of course, the conclusion that social welfare would be too cheap is Lewin’s left-liberal irony manifesting itself, but one can assume that readers on the far-right take the assertion as a serious statement. 98. Id. at 65. 99. Id. at 70. The report here acknowledges the suggestions of “Wells, Huxley, Orwell, and others,” the nightmare visions of “Brave New World and 1984,” that have “seemed less and less implausible over the years since their publication.” Id. 100. Id. at 71. 101. Id. at 73. 102. Id. at 77. 103. Frye, supra note 57, at 118. 104. Eldon J. Eisenach, THE LOST PROMISE OF PROGRESSIVISM 42 (1994). Eisenach closely examined the backgrounds of nineteen influential early progressives and determined that fourteen came from Congregationalist families--a “distinct Protestant minority in America” at that time---while two came from Methodist roots and one each from Presbyterian, Quaker and Jewish families. Id. 105. Id. Eisenach observed that the overarching paradox raised by the study of progressivism is this: why were these people--who among all those active in national political affairs, were the most cosmopolitan, scientifically trained, philosophically sophisticated, informed, and deeply critical of prevailing institutions and practices--also the most moral, religious, spiritual, and even romantically mystical in their public doctrines? And why were their opponents--those nationally active public men (I use men advisedly) who were by all measures more traditionally religious and incomparably narrower in their education, experiences and political imaginations--so secular-universalistic in their public doctrines, so modern and “liberal” in their discussion of rights and institutions? The Progressives, bearing the combined language of social science, social control, community, character piety, and memory, created systems of knowledge and institutional structures on which much of modern “liberal” America seems to rest. Id. at 46.106. James M. McPherson, ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE SECOND AMERICAN REVOLUTION 51 (1990). McPherson further observed that “the abolitionists and the radical wing of the Republican party went further than Lincoln in maintaining the principle of equal rights for all people” while Lincoln had argued, as early as 1837, that slavery was “an institution ‘founded on both injustice and bad policy.’” Id. 107. William E. Leuchtenburg, THE PERILS OF PROSPERITY 127 (2nd ed. 1993). 108. Id. at 127-28. 109. Id. at 130. 110. See Mark DeWolfe Howe, THE GARDEN AND THE WILDERNESS 11-15 (1965). 111. Frederick Mark Gedicks, THE RHETORIC OF CHURCH AND STATE 17 (1995). 112. Leuchtenburg, supra note 109 at 2-3. 113. C. S. Lewis, MERE CHRISTIANITY 78-83 (1952). 114. Id. at 25. Lewis, a devout Anglican, was unfazed by a rising tide of moral relativism. He observed that: In fact, of course, we all do believe that some moralities are better than others. We do believe that some of the people who tried to change the moral ideas of their own age were what we would call Reformers or Pioneers--people who understood morality better than their neighbors did. Very well then. The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that Right than others. Id.115. Alexis de Tocqueville, DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA 303 (Henry Reeve et al. ed. & trans., Knopf 1945) (1835). Tocqueville further observed that “Christianity . . . reigns without obstacle, by universal consent; the consequence is, as I have before observed, that every principle of the moral world is fixed and determinate, although the political world is abandoned to the debates and the experiments of men.” Id. at 304-05. 116. Andrew Feffer, THE CHICAGO PRAGMATISTS AND AMERICAN PROGRESSIVISM 20 (1993). 117. Id. 118. See Leuchtenburg, supra note 107, at 2-3 (progressives sought “the direct primary, the short ballot [and] the recall” as well as reform of “the city machine, the sweatshop employer [and] the traction magnate.”). 119. One need look no further than the Supreme Court’s opinion in Edwards v. Aquillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987) (invalidating state statute mandating equal time for “Creation Science”), to determine that religiously-based epistemologies are not taken seriously by the mainstream of contemporary American culture. 120. Leuchtenburg, supra note 6 at 6. For Leuchtenburg, very much a person of New Deal sensibilities, the assault was: not without reason. Even for the middle class, 1914 scarcely represented Paradise Lost. Lives were much more sharply circumscribed than they were to be in 1932, and the rigid morality of the time produced a great deal of cant and not a little cruelty. Over the life of all the classes hung the pall of Puritanism. . . . By 1932, the nation no longer had the same reverence for the old folkways, and it was determined to free itself from the harsh imperatives of religious asceticism. Id.121. Thomas L. Haskell, THE EMERGENCE OF PROFESSIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE 1 (1977). See id. at 1-23 for discussion of shift in cultural assumptions at the end of the nineteenth century. 122. Roscoe Pound, The Need for a Sociological Jurisprudence, 31 A.B.A. Reports 911, 917 (1907). 123. Roscoe Pound, The Theory of Judicial Decision, 36 Harv. L. Rev. 940, 956 (1923). 124. See Karl Llewellyn, Some Realism About Realism, 44 Harv. L. Rev. 1222 (1931). 125. Thurman Arnold, THE SYMBOLS OF GOVERNMENT (1935). 126. Leuchtenburg, supra note 107, at 138. 127. William E. Leuchtenburg, FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT AND THE NEW DEAL 339 (1963). 128. Id. at 345. Leuchtenburg wrote that as “heirs of the Enlightenment, they felt themselves part of a broadly humanistic movement to make man’s life on earth more tolerable, a movement that might someday even achieve a co-operative commonwealth.” Id. at 345-46. 129. David Halberstam, THE FIFTIES 4 (1995). 130. Id. at 138-48. 131. Id. at 147. 132. Id. 133. See John Rawls, A THEORY OF JUSTICE (1971). 134. See Ronald Dworkin, TAKING RIGHTS SERIOUSLY (1977). 135. Ronald Dworkin, LAW’S EMPIRE 413 (1986). 136. Id. at 216. 137. See, e.g. Leo Straus, The Three Waves of Modernity, in AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY: TEN ESSAYS 82 (Hilail Gildin ed., 1989)(“Scientific knowledge cannot validate value judgments; it is limited to factual judgments.”) 138. Of course, if one takes social construction seriously, then anyone--of progressive or any other sensibility — retells stories to shore up their world. Any world of rhetorical creation is subject to gradual decay. 139. Lawrence E. Harrison, Voodoo Politics, Atlantic Monthly, June 1993, at 101. 140. Id. at 107. 141. Id. The author cites to Melville J. Herskovits, LIFE IN A HAITIAN VALLEY (1964). 142. Id. at 106. 143. Thus, the individual need feel no shame for stealing because the Loa presented the opportunity. See id., at 106. 144. Reacting to an earlier draft of this article, one reader observed that the same thing could be said about the Calvinism of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Although the colonists certainly believed in the doctrine of predestination, their curious theology mandated strict observance of Christian norms in order to manifest one’s status among the “chosen.” This mythology created social pressure to live according to these norms. Thus the colonists culture strictly circumscribed the opportunities upon which an individual could act. Not coincidentally, these norms closely conform to those of progressivism. After all, they are derived from the same source. 145. Id. at 107. 146. Id. 147. Id. 148. They would argue that Harrison is not, in fact, a progressive, but rather an apologist for America’s imperialist past. This makes the point that defining the nature of progressive aspiration is the function of progressive narrative, whether such narratives take the form of ascendant ideology or discredited lunacy. 149. Ken Auletta, THE UNDERCLASS 50 (1982). 150. Id. 151. William Julius Wilson, THE TRULY DISADVANTAGED 62 (1987). 152. See, e.g., Oscar Lewis, The Culture of Poverty, in Daniel Patrick Moynihan (ed.), ON UNDERSTANDING POVERTY: PERSPECTIVES FROM THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 187 (1968). 153. Paul E. Peterson, The Urban Underclass and Poverty Paradox, 3, 10-12 (Paul E. Peterson ed., 1991). 154. Douglas S. Massey & Nancy A. Denton, AMERICAN APARTHEID: SEGREGATION AND THE MAKING OF THE UNDERCLASS 7 (1993). 155. See Peterson, supra note 157, at 9. 156. See Olati Johnson, Book Note, Integrating the "Underclass": Confronting America's Enduring Apartheid, 47 Stan. L. Rev. 787, 791 N.21 (1995). 157. Adolph Reed, Jr., The Liberal Technocrat, 246 Nation 167, 170 (1988). 158. Derrick Bell, AND WE ARE NOT SAVED: THE ELUSIVE QUEST FOR RACIAL JUSTICE 162-65 (1987). 159. See Joan Moore, Is There a Hispanic Underclass?, 70 Soc. Sci. Rev. 265 (1989). 160. Reginald Leamon Robinson, The Racial Limits of the Fair Housing Act: The Intersection of Dominant White Images, the Violence of Neighborhood Purity, and the Master Narrative of Black Inferiority, 37 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 69, 110 (1995). 161. Id. at 110-11 (citations omitted). 162. Sally Engle Merry, Resistance and the Cultural Power of Law, 29 Law & Soc'y Rev. 11, 12 (1995). Merry cited to Joel Handler, Postmodernism, Protest, and the New Social Movements, 26 Law & Soc'y Rev. 697 (1992). Handler argued that "postmoderns are willing to believe in the humane side of the Enlig |
