“Witch hunt” is an ugly, patriarchal, and outdated phrase from an ugly, patriarchal, and unenlightened time. Yet it’s also a phrase you might have heard used a few times these past few weeks and days. Apparently, a “witch hunt” is what “this” has now become; “this” being the widespread allegations of sexual misconduct against some of the most powerful men in our culture.
It’s an understandable sentiment, even if badly expressed. What we have — so the argument goes — are accusations of sexual abuse which are historical in nature and therefore hard to prosecute in a court of law. Unless evidence emerges that substantially proves a case (hand-written messages in High School yearbooks or a picture of a senator mock-groping a sleeping woman) the accusations remain circumstantial. To therefore condemn men based on witness testimony alone is to abandon the rule of law that has served us so well for many generations. This, say critics, amounts to a “witch hunt”.
All of which might be fairly argued if it did not overlook one fact. We’ve been hunting “witches” for centuries and usually for very good reasons.
The original witch trials of the late medieval period were brutal affairs, marrying the emerging process of law with occultism, often to quite gruesome ends. Yet once you accept that witchcraft was always a figment of the medieval imagination, you must also accept that the trials were about something else entirely. They were usually a response to larger forces that individuals in those cultures were incapable of either seeing or affecting. A failed crop might cause widespread hunger but, without the knowledge to explain the cause, other reasons were sought. Folk wisdom works in such a way that it would have made sense for effects to be rooted in something that resembled a loose causality. Fields are barren so the village fathers looked at the women who were also barren. Pigs suddenly break out with blisters so they look to the people with warts…
This is still the nature of witch hunts, which are never about witches and always about problems that lie beyond our ability to recognise. Witch hunts may be irrational but the reasons behind them are always found in the material world.
Take, for example, the most famous “witch hunt” of our modern history. Why, really, did America endure McCarthyism in the 1950s? Was it because of some genuine penetration by the Soviets into the fabric of American society or was it a response to something else that was far harder to recognise at the time? The main targets for the Un-American Activities Committee were stars and writers of film and television, the initial “Hollywood Ten” growing to include 300 names who, like those scapegoats for infertility in the Middle Ages, seemed to have been held as proxy for the thing they loosely represented. Looking back on the McCarthy period now, the paranoia felt then seems largely rooted in a crisis of American identity; a response, almost, to the cultural power shifting from politicians to the media, a prelude to our celebrity-obsessed age.
There are other examples of similar panics such as that surrounding paedophilia around 2001 and which was so memorably satirised as “Paedogeddon” by Chris Morris in Brass Eye. If we assume there was no sudden rise in the number of UK paedophiles in the late 1990s, then where did the moral fear emanate? Was it media induced paranoia or symptomatic of a rapidly changing world and the emerging internet culture? Look deeply enough and we can be sure to find a material cause.
This is the intriguing thing about witch hunts. They are often portrayed as some unthinking response to an event, the braying primal scream of people incapable of rational thought, but perhaps they are not so much a cultural flaw but a feature; a collective behaviour that reveal some change that might not yet have been perceived. If so, then what might we learn from the current crisis in our sexual politics?
Well, the first — and most obvious — thing to say is that much of what we’re currently witnessing is not a witch hunt. Witch hunts find witches where there aren’t any, whether they are Russian agents or paedophiles. The evidence mounting against Judge Roy Moore and Kevin Spacey, to take the two most high profile post-Weinstein examples, is looking incontrovertible.
The difficulties only begin to arise once we move beyond the primary cases, which should rightly be settled in courts of law. Questions arise about the court of public opinion where allegations are floated for a day, a life scarred or ruined, before the story disappears with no resolution or clarity. George Takei was accused by an actor who claimed to have sexually assaulted him 40 years ago. It was an allegation that Takei strongly denied before the story drifted into the miasma of a dozen other stories of a dozen other stars. One day the allegations were about Richard Dreyfuss and the next Dustin Hoffman. Just who are we inclined to believe — the accuser or the accused– when the correct answer is properly neither?
This argument has nothing to do with establishing guilt or innocence, any more than it’s about facts, evidence, or the judicial process. Really, it’s about the nature of moral panic whereby some iniquity latent in our culture gives rise to a public mood which circumvents rational processes of mind. That is to say: critics that cry “witch hunt” are all too willing to overlook why many feel compelled to join the “witch hunt”. Indeed, the overt assumptions behind these panics are reasonable: that witchcraft, communism and paedophilia are bad, and that women should be helped to stand up to their abusers. Yet we must also be cautious that sentiment doesn’t entirely swamp reason and convince us that smoke always implies fire.
Unless we have personal knowledge of a situation, we can only speculate about circumstances, motives, and actions. The best most of us can ever really say is that reality is unknowable beyond the limited scope of our senses (and even in that we’re often prone to our own flawed subjectivity). None of us know the reality of any single case of harassment. We can no more defend the accused that we can malign the accuser. Traditionally, of course, the benefit has gone to the person we think we know the best. Person X has appeared in some of our favourite movies and, in some way, we probably think he is the character he plays on our screens. Actors draw out our empathy so it’s unsurprising when we feel that we ‘know’ them. Yet the truth is we don’t know.
In a case of a cultural panic, however, we are pressed to accept sentimental rather than rational arguments. The media are often guilty of glibly repeating truisms: “you know this goes on”; “this has been happing for too long”; “we should start to listen to victims”. Those might be correct but they should also not step in the way of the legal process. Too often is the simple acknowledgement of “not knowing” characterised as being “sympathetic” to the accused. This is when the person defending the witch could just as easily be accuse of witchcraft, like the lawyers defending Hollywood communists in the 1950s were themselves labelled as “sympathisers”. Bartley Crum, lawyer for the “Hollwood Ten”, had his phone tapped by the FBI, considered a “subversive”, and would later take his own life. One need only think of how difficult it would be to defend, say, the reputation of any of the celebrity paedophiles of the past decade without somehow implicating yourself in their crimes. The danger of sentiment, however well intended, is that it doesn’t make room for cold, hard, unblinking reason.
If we are serious about our sexual politics, we should also stop calling these events “witch hunts” and see them for what they really are: cultural panics grounded in sometimes inexplicably complicated but real social instabilities. It would certainly be welcome if the current scandals bring about a real sexual revolution in the workplace yet it is immediately difficult to see how revelations in Washington or New York will enable a secretary in some small office in Bolton or Leeds to stand up to their abusive boss and protect their self without also destroying their life.
It’s why these events feel so removed from everyday life and why, like panics of the past, the underlying cause of our moral crisis might as yet be something barely perceived in the present moment. It might well be another marker in the roadmap of postmodernism, this era when facts are secondary to sentiment, when a self-confessed sexual predator sits in the White House and our moral certainties are being challenged by resurgent racism, white supremacy, and nationalism.
The way through it, as always, is to resist the panic and for both women and men to work together to establish the truth. We are emotional creatures but we are rational too. It sometimes feels like a curse but we should always strive to make sure it’s a blessing.
