For some reason the concept of taboo has been on my mind and I aim to use this opportunity to get to the bottom of it. I want to spell it tabu for some reason, probably because it's shorter and more exciting. As it turns out it's more linguistically correct. The origin of the word is Oceanic -- tapu in Tongan and Maori, tabu in Fijian, kapu in Hawaiian (verboten in German, trayf in Yiddish, haram in Arabic, right out in Monty Python). The word and its spelling were brought to the West by James Cook who described it as he observed it being practiced among the Tongans he visited on his South Pacific voyages in 1777 (quoted from the
Wikipedia article on the topic):
Not one of them would sit down, or eat a bit of any thing.... On expressing my surprise at this, they were all taboo, as they said; which word has a very comprehensive meaning; but, in general, signifies that a thing is forbidden.
Ever since Cook we like to think of taboos as being something other and primitive, but taboos abound and indeed proliferate in the West. Many taboos exist around dietary practices-- abstaining from pork in some traditions, from beef in others, from human flesh almost universally. From anything animal in many personal taboo systems. Freud famously identified incest and patricide as behavioral taboos that he supposed were observed everywhere and that formed the basis of society. He was wrong about this too, but in any case, if there is a universal behavioral practice that forms the basis of civilization it may be the mere establishment of taboos.
There are historic, anthropological or sociobiological explanations for some taboos. The taboo against incest is in force, probably naturally, to reduce the proliferation within a population of sometimes lethal recessive traits that are more likely to be passed on in pairings of closely related mates. Some dietary prohibitions may have been introduced to stop the spread of food borne diseases and encoded into a culture's laws far beyond the time of the threat that inspired them. Taboos always exist in opposition to choice. We don't proscribe the impossible, we only prohibit behavior that humans are capable of choosing to engage in.
Most taboos still in force are cultural at the root. Those that are not proscribed by religion or encoded in law are transmitted by social signals-- modeled in schools, decried by moralizing editorials and PSAs, omitted via censorship, discouraged by the human resource departments of prospective employers. We must not kneel for the National Anthem. We must not be silent about our gratitude for the service of our military personnel or question their cause or recognize the vanity of their deaths in action and of their killings. We must not wear beige at debates and our sleeves must not be unrolled when we shake hands with the voters. We must not demur to assert that we are capitalists.
Some taboos seem natural, right and proper, for instance the one that says you can't just come up as close as you like behind someone you don't know, smell her hair and kiss her on the back of her head. We can't have this.
Other taboos seem rather arbitrary and imposed, often in a presumptuous way. There is a new taboo especially among younger people against using a third person pronoun not of the choosing of the person referred to. I don't know how I feel about this one-- it is challenging to understand a justification for a person prescribing how others should refer to them when they are not around-- but given the historic reasoning behind it, I do not want to be the one to violate it, let alone to forbid it from being implemented.
Our president breaks taboos all the time. He cusses like a fucking sailor in front of crowds. Not merely shedding but shredding the dignity of the office he calls out his predecessor by name and taunts opponents with belittling nicknames. He breaks treaties to suit his own poor taste and judgment. He blurts out state secrets to visiting dignitaries. He has only nice things to say about his autocratic dictator boyfriends and his Nazi fanboys. There is speculation in some circles that he may not willingly leave office when his time is up. He is such a cyclone of faux pas that there is no starting point for anyone who would hope to put a lid on it. The root of his revolution in presidential decorum is ultimately shallow as a dish. There's nothing of substance at the core of it; he's just an empty-headed, poorly raised, selfish boor who doesn't know any better. You can only watch in fascinated horror, and yet, if you're honest with yourself, you have to admit it's not all bad to have your reflex to recoil-- white gloved hand daintily covering your gasp-- occasionally smashed about the respect due his office.
Without a doubt, some taboos are meant to be broken. It used to be taboo in the South (too recently for comfort) to drink water from the same fountain-- or to pass it in the same toilet-- as someone from another race. To question the authority and wisdom of this interdiction was taboo. It could not be questioned because there was no wisdom at the center of it. This is the peril of such taboos: their power is only enhanced by the willful ignorance they encourage you to have about them.
The taboos that really gall me are the products of think tanks and marketing departments, such as the one that recently distracted us from the message that Ilhan Omar intended to convey in her tweets about the influence of money in politics. The story became (conveniently for the targets of her criticism) about her breaking of the taboo. This was not merely an excess of sanctity on the part of her critics; the intentionally missed point in the context of a violation of a sacred put her life in danger. Aversion to taboos can be exploited for mischief. In Afghanistan as recently as
2015, a mullah who was scolded by a woman for selling amulets on the grounds of the mosque falsely accused the woman of destroying a Quran, which inspired the crowd in the mosque in which the incident took place to drag her out of the mosque, stone and beat her to death, run her over with a car, burn her body and throw it into the Kabul River on the spot. Our president who fanned the flames of outrage over Rep. Omar's audacity is well aware that his most impressionable supporters are no less human than those Afghanis.
Bernie Sanders was recently at the center of another breach of a sacred. During a CNN town hall, Sanders was asked by a Harvard centrist provocateur and future 1%-er whether felons should be allowed to vote while still doing their time. In spite of the question being posed in Boston and framed with the hypothetical of the Boston Marathon bomber as the potential voter, Sanders forcefully replied yes and elaborated several reasons for his answer (paraphrased below):
- Convicts can already vote while serving their time in Maine and Vermont (and have always had this right).
- Convicts are already being punished (and not always justly) by serving time-- disenfranchisement does not enhance the justice.
- If you believe that voting is everyone's right in a democracy then no one (not even terrible people) should be denied the right.
- Stripping anyone of the right is a slippery slope. (Experience in the other 48 states bears this out.)
At the suggestion from the CNN anchor that he'd handed his opponents a sound bite, Sanders merely shrugged knowingly. The difference between Sanders' iconoclasm and Trump's is that there is reason and principle behind Sanders', and furthermore, the impulse is to empower not himself, but -- in spite of the risk of some political harm to himself-- those disempowered by the taboo.
Sanders' increasingly undeniable popularity can be attributed in some degree to his success at purposeful taboo smashing. For years the conventional wisdom has been that in spite of the prosperity, security, equality and progress that could be attributed to the socialist policies that defeated the Great Depression and Hitler, that embarked on Civil Rights and landed us on the moon by the end of the 1960's, socialism is forbidden. Our way of life is owed to our capitalist system of economics! There is nothing that the Invisible Hand of the free market cannot accomplish! The entrepreneurial class must be kept free to do what they do now and always so that the rest of us can benefit eventually perhaps! It took a democratic socialist to point out that it is true, our sick way of life can indeed be blamed entirely on capitalism, that capitalism's cyclic epic failures of itself and of us are a feature not a bug, and the cure therefore is not just more capitalism. After 40 years at least of the imposition of a state religion fetishizing the market, we have been conditioned to start back from heretic challenges to it. The leader of the opposition party to Trump recently said in an interview about Democrats that "by and large, whatever orientation they came to Congress with, they know that we have to hold the center. That we have to go down the mainstream." This is not opposition. This is orthodoxy, the manifestation of Stockholm Syndrome that comes with being held hostage to corporate donors. As Sanders' approach makes clear, the antidote is heterodoxy: telling the truth.
Beyond presidential politics, for decades, the strategy of the right has been to commandeer the reins of state and federal legislatures, governorships and the presidency, and thereby to stack the judiciary. At this they have been exceedingly successful, culminating in the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court last fall. The upshot of these decades of struggle and expenditure is that for the first time in years, the 3 branches of government are in their hands. (The unruly congress was won back in a progressive wave last November, but for now they maintain a grip on that absurdly lopsided relic of Hamiltonian aristocratic confederacy, the Senate). The effort has already borne fruit in the largest tax cuts in generations to the top tenth of a percent, and the enshrinement of Citizen's United which legitimizes whatever contributions corporations would like to make to the candidates and causes of their choice. They will have their hands on social benefits of government that they are deeply intent on eliminating: Social Security, guaranteed health care, environmental protection, corporate regulation, public education, equal protections under the law. The rationale for the strategy is predicated on a well established taboo-- that there is such a thing as natural law, and that capturing the flag of the Supreme Court is victory since it necessarily implies capturing the law. But laws are only paper. Laws and taboos are observed by choice, and minds can be changed. It's happened on this soil before: the social contract can be voided by the people, and the power vested in authorities can be rescinded. But first we must recognize the taboos that keep us in chains.
