Impression management the self-concept, social identity, and interpersonal relations by Barry R Schlenker

PREFACE

Impression management, or image control, is a central aspect of interpersonal relations. Consciously or unconsciously, people attempt to control images in real or imagined social interactions. By doing so, they define the nature of the interaction, the identities they and others possess, and the meanings of their interpersonal actions. What people believe they “are” and the outcomes they receive from social life are both predicated in large part on impression management.

The importance of studying impression management has been ap- preciated by many social psychologists. However, a number of obstacles have impeded work. First, the area has been somewhat fragmented and compartmentalized. Symbolic interactionists—social psychologists who happen to be housed primarily in sociology departments—and experimental social psychologists—housed primarily in psychology departments—have each made major contributions. But surprisingly little cross-fertilization has occurred, each group remaining cool, unin- terested, and often ignorant of the work of the other. One goal of the present book is to provide an integrative approach to the area.

Second, a number of misconceptions exist about impression management. The term has numerous negative connotations that make it seem more appropriate for students of public relations than for students of social psychology. It brings to mind automatons programmed to smile appropriately and do everything in their power to please or even con an audience. Impression management can involve such behavior, but it also involves much more. In i its full sense impression management is integral to the study of the self, identity, and imterpersonal relations. One goal of this book is to demonstrate revelance of the topic to this wide array of phenomena.

Third, the impression-management approach frequently has been criticized for failing to develop specific, testable hypotheses. It is true that no definitive theory of impression management has yet been achieved. Yet the elements of such a theory are beginning to take form.

The approach is becoming increasingly refined and is hardly lacking in precise hypotheses fit for the experimental crucible. No claims are made that this book presents a finalized theory, but it is hoped that it provides an impetus for theory development and enough hypotheses to generate even more work in the area.

Finally, there has been no book from which students could gain a general exposure to ideas and research in the area. The present book is intended to serve this purpose. It does not attempt to be encyclopedic in its coverage; several volumes would be required for that. Nor does it attempt to provide a detailed, critical examination of the methodology and research done in the area.

Although such an examination would undoubtedly please some advanced readers, it would detract from the usefulness of the book for those who want only to gain a general appreciation of the area. Instead, my aim is to provide a single, reasonably concise volume that serves as an introduction to the study of impression management.

In places, the book seems to take a “how-to-do-it” turn, as when it discusses how to use nonverbal signals to increase interpersonal attraction. In general I tried to avoid that style, but I succumbed every now and then for at least three reasons. First, the data that exist in some areas are decidedly one-sided. In general there has been much less re- search on people's actions than on their reactions. There is research that shows how observers respond to a particular behavior used by an actor (for example, how observers respond when an actor uses one nonverbal action rather than another), but less research on the conditions that determine when an actor will use such behaviors. Thus, we often know what "works" on audiences but don’t necessarily know that actors will use these efficacious strategies under appropriate conditions. It is reasonable, though, to believe that people learn what works during the course of their social lives and use these strategies when called for; indeed, a variety of anecdotal data (often found in explicit ““how-to-do- it’’ books) suggests that people are sensitive to such audience reactions and take advantage of them. In presenting such material it is difficult to avoid statements such as “‘People who are attempting to increase their attractiveness to an audience should... .’’ Second, the question of how audiences react to particular strategies is interesting in its own right, and I didn’t feel like excluding such material merely because research on the opposite side of the coin has not yet been done. Finally, it is often easier to write in a “how-to-do-it” manner than to stay committed to a more neutral style. I tried to fight the urge, but I plead guilty to slipping on occasion. (...)

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THE SELF-CONCEPT AS A SELF-THEORY

Chapter 2 discussed the theme that people are naive scientists who build theories to help them understand their environment and function effectively within it. These theories extend to the self. Seymour Epstein (1973, p. 407) defined the self-concept as ‘‘a theory the individual has unwittingly constructed about himself as an experiencing, functioning individual ... part of a broader theory which he holds with respect to his entire range of significant experience.” It contains a cache of per- sonal facts of the types James discussed in describing one’s bodily ap- pearance, possessions, friends, and so forth. It contains self-constructs such as being friendly, intelligent, and independent. It contains hypotheses, or beliefs, that relate aspects of these facts and constructs to each other (for example, “I am independent and hence don’t conform to the opinions of others’’). One’s aspirations can also enter the picture to produce a self-concept that represents a blend of one’s actualities and potentialities (R. H. Turner, 1968).

Self-Constructs: Categorizing Ourselves

Self-constructs, also called self-schemata, are key aspects of the self-concept. Self-constructs are cognitive categories or generalizations about the self. People categorize themselves on construct dimensions such as conforming-independent, friendly-unfriendly, competent- incompetent, and dominant-submissive. Like other types of constructs, self-constructs are summary terms that subsume numerous facts. One can’t keep track of each and every personal behavior or self-relevant fact, but one can deal with a limited number of constructs that seem to integrate these facts into meaningful categories. If, for example, you are asked to describe your mental abilities, you undoubtedly would be unable to recall all the behaviors that might be relevant. But it is quite easy to list self-descriptive constructs that encompass such facts: ‘‘mod- erately creative,” ‘‘excellent memory,” ‘‘strong on verbal fluency,” “‘average on quantitative ability,” and so on. People find it easy to explain their own actions within such frameworks.

Self-constructs are not uniquely or simply determined by facts. Imagine a person having a conversation with a co-worker who privately disagrees with the colleague's opinion but who publicly expresses some agreement with it. Is this person conforming, submissive, tactful, friendly, ingratiating, self-doubting, or something else? On the basis of the behavior alone it is impossible to tell. If you knew a variety of other facts about the person and situation, they could narrow the possibilities. For example, knowing that the person has high self-esteem might eliminate the construct ‘‘self-doubting.”’ But even when many such facts are known, there are alternative constructs that could be applied to describe the same set of facts. There is never a situation where one set of facts can be explained by only one construct.

Instead of constructs’ being dictated by facts, constructs help us to interpret facts. Facts are given meanings by the constructs. In the example, the act of publicly agreeing while privately disagreeing would be given meaning as soon as it were interpreted as, say, “ingratiation,” and that meaning is quite different from the meaning associated with the construct ‘‘tactful." People have some latitude in the constructs they apply to interpret their behaviors, and they attempt to apply constructs that they find personally desirable in maximizing their outcomes from social interaction. Most people, for example, prefer the self-construct “tactful” over the self-construct “ingratiating” and will go to great lengths to convince themselves and others that the former rather than the latter “‘really" describes their behavior.

Self-constructs organize and guide the ways people process self-related information. Once a particular self-construct is well established—that is, formed, used continually, and supported by a lot of data—it becomes increasingly resistant to contradictory information.

We tend to notice behaviors that support that construct and interpret behaviors in terms of that construct rather than another. A person who normally categorizes herself as tactful and independent is more likely to interpret the behavior in the example (publicly agreeing while privately disagreeing) as demonstrating tact and not conformity. Research indicates that established cognitive categories do become increasingly immune to overthrow by single instances (see Carson, 1969; Mischel, 1973; Neisser, 1967, 1976).

Once established, self-constructs serve as selective devices that “determine whether information is attended to, how it is structured, how much importance is attached to it, and what happens to it subsequently” (Markus, 1977, p. 64). Self-constructs give meanings to our worlds. To demonstrate the importance of self-constructs, Hazel Markus (1977) classified students into those who had well articulated self-constructs on an important dimension (independence versus dependence) and those who did not. Those with well articulated self- constructs were able to process construct-related information faster, made related judgments and decisions about themselves more easily, were better able to recall related behaviors, were more self-confident in predicting their own future relevant actions, and were more resistant to information that contradicted these self-constructs. Markus concluded that “only when a self-description derives from a well-articulated generalization about the self can it be expected to converge and form a consistent pattern with the individual's other judgments, decisions, and actions” (p. 65). Self-constructs thus affect actions by affecting how people attend to, interpret, and respond to situations (Markus, 1977; Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977; Rogers, Rogers, & Kuiper, 1979; R. (G:
Turner, 1978). In this sense, people who know themselves or at least think they do—that is, have well-articulated self-constructs—can more easily process information and make decisions about what is best for them. They believe they know what they are and therefore what they should and can do in various situations.

Expectations: Deciding What to Do

Self-constructs affect our expectations of what we should do and can do in various situations. Suppose you viewed yourself as independent, and your roommate asked you to sign a petition supporting an issue you didn’t really support. What should you do? The answer is clear: to be independent, you should resist your roommate's pressure and refuse to sign. If you didn’t view yourself as independent, your answer might be quite different. Or suppose you view yourself as introverted, poor at social conversation, physically unappealing, and lacking in sex appeal. What do you think your chances are of getting the gregarious and attractive classmate you admire to go out on a date and return your affection? You would probably expect failure. If you held the opposite set of self-constructs, you would anticipate greater success. Thus, self-constructs can affect people’s expectations about what they should do and how effective they will be in various situations.

Albert Bandura (1977b) discussed self-efficacy expectations, which are beliefs “that one can successfully execute the behavior required to produce” particular outcomes (p. 193). As Bandura indicates, self-efficacy expectations determine whether a person will begin to cope with a potentially unpleasant situation and will work to accomplish some goal, how much effort the person will expend to reach the goal, and how long the person will continue to work in the face of frustrations and aversions. People who believe they can effectively accomplish some goal will begin sooner, work harder, and continue longer than those who do not. Our expectations, which are influenced by our self-constructs, thus have great impact on our behaviors. If you expect that nothing you can do will get the attractive classmate to agree to a date, why even ask? You will just be rejected. If you expect that your agreeable and sophisticated manner will surely get him or her to say “yes,” don’t hesitate for a moment.

Functions of the Self-Concept

Epstein (1973, p. 407) argues that the self-concept has three major functions for a person. It should (a) ‘‘optimize the pleasure/pain balance of the individual over the course of a lifetime,” (b) ‘‘organize the data of experience in a manner that can be coped with effectively,’ and (c) facilitate “‘the maintenance of self-esteem.” The first two functions are familiar ones, involving hedonism and cognitive organization.

People who “‘know themselves’’—that is, can accurately gauge their own capabilities and potential accomplishments—can make decisions that increase their outcomes from life. The third function, self-esteem maximization, has been assumed by most personality theorists to be a basic human motive (see Hall & Lindzey, 1978). Self-esteem is usually defined as an overall self-evaluation or judgment of personal worth (Wells & Marwell, 1976). People desire to think well of themselves, their attributes, and their actions. Some of the ways people go about doing so will be explored in the next chapter.

The Scientific Status of the Self-Concept

When the self-concept is seen as a self-theory, scientific objections to its status lose their force. The self-concept ‘‘can no longer be dismissed as unscientific, or as a reincarnation of the soul, unless one is also willing to dismiss theory, in general, as unscientific” (Epstein, 1973, p. 415).
Some people might argue that it is not necessary to talk of the self-concept. One could simply examine each of a person’s self-relevant facts, constructs, and beliefs in isolation. Yet, as all scientists know, no fact, construct, or hypothesis (belief) exists in isolation. Facts are given meaning by constructs, constructs are given meaning through their place in a theory, and no hypothesis can be tested in total isolation from the rest of the elements of a theory (see Hempel, 1966; Nagel, 1961).

People understand themselves and their place in the world through the integrated elements of their self-concepts and use the self-concept to facilitate functioning in social life.

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SOCIAL EXPERIENCE

Some people are offended by the suggestion that the self-concept arises in social interaction and is affected by what others think. They willingly admit that other people probably have had their self-concepts formed and affected this way, but—as for themselves—well, they are more independent than that. Such resistance is understandable. The self, the core of one’s being, is sometimes viewed as the last vestige of personal independence in a world that has become oriented toward others. Given this skepticism, it is worth examining some of the evidence that supports the basic hypotheses of symbolic interactionism. 

Early Social Interaction

According to symbolic interactionism, the self-concept arises from social experience. It follows that without social interaction any self-concept that exists will be extremely crude and one’s interpersonal relations will be hindered. The most direct way of testing such hypotheses would be to randomly assign newborn infants to either an enriched social interaction experience or a period of social deprivation. For obvious ethical reasons, one cannot conduct such a study with humans—I hope no one would want to. But such studies have been conducted with nonhumans.
Gordon Gallup (1977) reasoned that the self-concept rests on the fundamental ability to recognize and code oneself as a distinct personal entity. If an organism cannot recognize itself, it is difficult to argue that it can have a sense of self; if it does show self-recognition, the basis for a rudimentary self-concept would be present. Gallup investigated self-recognition in chimpanzees and other great apes. He concluded that the great apes do possess a rudimentary self-concept and that it is dramatically affected by social experience. In an initial study, he individually exposed preadolescent chimps to a full-length mirror to see how they would react. For the first two or three days, the chimps reacted to their mirror image as if it were another chimp, bobbing up and down, vocalizing at the reflection, and occasionally making threatening gestures. Later, the chimps began to show signs of self-recognition. They used the mirror to groom parts of their bodies that were outside their normal sight, entertained themselves by blowing bubbles and making faces, and even picked food from their teeth.

Despite these observations, skeptics might have been unconvinced of the chimps’ ability for self-recognition. So Gallup anesthetized each of the chimps and painted an odorless, nonirritating bright red dye on parts of their faces that they could not see without a mirror. Because of the anesthesia and the properties of the dye, the chimps would not be able to know that it had been applied unless they saw it in the mirror and knew that the image in the mirror was theirs. After awakening, the chimps were placed in their individual cages, without mirrors, and the researchers counted the number of times they spontaneously touched the dye-marked spots. The mirror was then reintroduced. It was found that, when the chimps could see themselves in the mirror, they touched the spots 25 times more frequently than when the mirror was absent.

The chimps spent more time looking into the mirror than they had before being marked with the red dye, and they attempted to smell and examine their fingers after touching the spots. This is convincing evidence for self-recognition in nonhumans. If self-concept development is dependent on social experience, as symbolic interactionists suppose, then chimps reared in isolation without the possibility of social interaction should have difficulty at the mirror recognition task. Gallup (Gallup, McClure, Hill, & Bundy, 1971) raised some chimps in isolation and compared their responses to chimps raised with companions. While the normal chimps seemed to recognize themselves in the mirror, the socially deprived chimps did not.

In another study (Hill, Bundy, Gallup, & McClure, 1970) two isolation-reared chimps who showed no signs of self-recognition were given three months of social experience by being housed in the same cage. In contrast to a chimp that continued in isolation, who remained unable to identify the reflection, the chimps given social experience showed signs of self-recognition ability. At least some of the effects of the social isolation were reversible. This is persuasive evidence of the necessity for social experience in the development of the self-concept.

With the importance of social interaction in mind, Gallup (1977) has speculated about what might happen if an organism capable of self-concept development were reared with members of another species, from whom the animal might learn unusual patterns of behavior and self-identification. Presumably, the animal might come to misidentify itself and see itself as a member of that other species. The data are certainly consistent with this possibility, although conclusive evidence has yet to be amassed. One chimp raised with humans and taught sign language referred to other chimps whom she had seen for the first time as “black bugs.” Vicki, another chimp raised in a home with humans, was taught to sort pictures into two piles—human and nonhuman. One day while Vicki was working on this task, her own picture was slipped in with the other photos. When she came to it, Vicki placed it in the pile with the humans!

The evidence from studies of the great apes clearly indicates the importance of social experience in the development of self-recognition ability (see also Meddin, 1979). The rudimentary self-concepts possessed by the great apes seem to require social interaction to develop fully. These results are consistent with correlational studies of humans that indicate that early social experience is a key to the later development of effective interaction patterns (see Mussen, Conger, & Kagan, 1969).

Similar experimental studies with nonhuman species indicate that both lack of mother contact and peer isolation produce later behavioral abnormalities (Harlow & Harlow, 1966; Harlow, Harlow, & Suomi, 1971). Social experience is of paramount importance in the development of a normal personality.

Reflected Appraisals

A major assumption of the symbolic-interactionist approach is that people’s self-concepts develop as they see themselves reflected in the actions of significant others. Even after the self-concept has formed, others’ self-directed actions still should influence what people think of themselves, at least under certain conditions. As Cooley (1902/1922) put it:

As we see our face, figure, and dress in the glass [mirror], and are in- terested in them because they are ours, and pleased or otherwise with them according as they do or do not answer to what we should like them to be; so in imagination we see in another’s mind some thought of our ap- pearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are variously affected by it [p. 184].

A person’s perceptions of the impressions others form about him or her are termed reflected appraisals. Reflected appraisals can be based on explicit or implicit information. For example, Grandpa might bring over one of his friends to see his 3-year-old grandson and remark in the child’s presence “Look at that build—husky already. And you should see his grip. That boy’s gonna make a fine fullback some day; nobody will be able to tackle him.” Hearing the explicit evaluation, the child begins to form self- constructs such as strong and athletic. Implicit information can also be transformed into reflected appraisals. Tacit cues for reflected appraisals can derive from the attentions of others (Does Mother care about me, or does she seem to ignore me?); the tones of others’ voices (Is Mother calm or agitated when I’m around?); and the things they don’t say (Why doesn’t Mother ever say I’m pretty?).

Reflected appraisals do not always correspond perfectly with the actual evaluation another person attempts to convey. A person might misinterpret what another says, particularly if the comment is ambiguous to begin with, and believe that the self-evaluation was more or less favorable than the source intended (see Jacobs, Berscheid, & Walster, 1971). Moreover, explicit and implicit information can sometimes conflict, making it difficult to obtain a clear reflected appraisal. A mother might tell her daughter that she is darling and loved, while the child notices that her mother speaks in an affectionless tone, doesn’t look her in the eye, and never hugs her. Confusion can result, as the child has difficulty determining how her mother really feels. Messages may even flatly contradict each other, as when a mother asks her daughter to give her a hug, while her tone of voice clearly tells the daughter to stay away. Such contradictory messages can lead to disorganized behavior patterns later in life of the type exhibited by schizophrenics (Bateson, Jackson, Haley, & Weakland, 1956).

One's parents typically provide the first significant source of personal evaluation through reflected appraisals. One dramatic example of how the reflected appraisals of parents can affect one’s self-concept is the story of the boyhood of John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), the British philosopher who made important contributions to psychology, sociology, and economics. James Mill, John’s father, was a disciplinarian who structured the boy’s education and development strictly. John learned Greek by the age of 3; by 7 he had read Plato, Herodotus, and Xenophon and had begun the study of Latin. By 12 he had finished Virgil, Ovid, Aristotle, Socrates, and Aristophanes; was expert in geometry, algebra, and calculus; had written a Roman history and a history of Holland; and had edited his father’s history of India (Heilbroner, 1967). His father’s demands were constant. There were no vacations, no play with peers, no ‘‘pleasure’’ reading. James kept up a constant barrage of tests for his son. Even while riding, the boy was forced to memorize signs and aspects of the countryside, on which his father would quiz him later to improve his memory. Through all this, John had no idea that his upbringing was unusual or that he was particularly gifted; his self-evaluations were provided by his father, who treated his ac- complishments as unremarkable (Tedeschi & Lindskold, 1976). Only later, when he compared himself with others, did he come to recognize his uniqueness.

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ROLES: THE PARTS WE PLAY

People come to define themselves through social interaction, seeing themselves in part through the eyes of significant others. One of the factors that affect how other people see us and act toward us is the roles we occupy. Some, like the male or female role, we are born into; others are the result of our personal efforts and abilities or lack of them— doctor, lawyer, psychologist. In either case, roles exist apart from the particular individuals who occupy them and can act as social scripts that dictate how we should act.

The word role derives from the Latin word rotula, the sheet of parchment wrapped around a wooden roller that contained the part that an actor recited on stage. In the theater, roles constrain actors’ behavior, at least to some degree. Actors must say certain lines at certain times, engage in specific behaviors at specific moments, work with particular props, coordinate their actions with those of other actors, and, in general, convey to the audience the character of the person they are playing. Within these constraints, of course, actors are free to display their own unique talents, fleshing out the character to give spontaneity and life to the author’s words. They might ad-lib on occasion, throwing in or changing lines and dramatizing gestures to bring the character home and touch a responsive chord in the audience. Typically, the better the actor, the better his or her ability to improvise in a way that meets with the audience’s approval. But the role still gives direction and purpose to the actor’s behaviors, guiding them along a predetermined course.

Role Theory

Role theorists have taken this model and applied it to everyday social behavior. Role theory (see Biddle & Thomas, 1966; Merton, 1957; Sarbin & Allen, 1968; E. J. Thomas, 1968) is a prominent area of study that has been greatly influenced by symbolic interactionism and the dramaturgical approach’ Just as actors’ behaviors are guided by their roles, people’s social behaviors are shaped by the roles they occupy. A role is usually defined in terms of the part an individual plays within a group. Possible roles are numerous: doctor, lawyer, banker, politician, parent, teacher, son, daughter, construction worker, female, male.

Each role carries with it certain perceived and expected behaviors that role occupants enact in social situations. The perceived attributes are easily demonstrated by the stereotypes most people associate with certain roles. Everyone can characterize what a ‘‘traditional woman,” or “homemaker,” is supposed to be like. She should be dedicated to her family, be oriented toward the home rather than a professional career, and be submissive, affectionate, emotional, and skilled at cooking, cleaning, sewing, and so on. To facilitate the adoption of this role, young girls were and often still are cuddled and encouraged to express emotion, given doll sets so that they could gain the “proper” perspective through play, taught how to cook and sew, discouraged from expressing dominant or aggressive behaviors, and so on. Young boys often receive quite different training to encourage behavior patterns that are relevant to the "male" role in society. The expected behaviors that roles carry with them, then, are based on social agreement about what the occupants of certain roles should be like; society encourages and rewards proper role enactment and discourages out-of-role behaviors. People’s cognitive scripts for social interactions are based in part on shared beliefs about such role requirements.

The stereotypical attributes associated with particular roles often emerge because of their usefulness to society. For example, bankers would quickly go out of business if they were perceived as unstable, untrustworthy, risk oriented, and poor at mathematics. Hence, stereotypes of bankers include such attributes as conservative, cautious, stable, precise, and good with figures. Society and bankers both benefit if a person with these characteristics takes such a job, or if the person acquires these characteristics quickly after.

Everyone has many roles. A person might be a wife, mother, daughter, teacher, professor, scientist, athlete, and many other things. On occasion the demands of roles may conflict, as in the case of a professor who has her own husband enrolled in a course or the college student who returns home for the holidays to find that his newly acquired independence is not appreciated by his parents. People often shift from one role to another within a brief time. A university faculty member might adopt a “‘professor’’ role while at work, maintaining an intellectual aura and seeming emotionally aloof. After work, the professor might shift into a “parent role,” shed the dignity that was so carefully cultivated during the day, and gleefully crawl around on all fours with the children. Occasionally people have difficulty shifting out of roles at appropriate times, as when a lawyer greets his or her spouse after work in the tone of voice usually reserved for the jury.

Roles and the Self-Concept

The cumulative impact of one’s roles can influence the self-concept and behavior. People typically come to view themselves in terms of the attributes and behavior patterns dictated by their roles (see Kuhn, 1960; Sarbin & Allen, 1968). The roles become internalized as part of the self-concept, providing people with role-related self-constructs and expectations: ‘A banker should be categorized as conservative and stable.” I should behave in a certain way, and others should treat me in a certain way.” Through role enactment, people can “become” the roles they play. In a statement quite reminiscent of William James’ discussion of habits (see Chapter 2), Waller (1932) noted:

That stiff and formal manner in which the young teacher compresses himself every morning when he puts on his collar becomes ... a plaster cast which at length he cannot loosen. ... The didactic manner, the authoritative manner, the flat, assured tones of voice that go with them, are bred in the teacher by his dealings in the classroom... and these traits are carried  over by the teacher into his interpersonal relations [pp. 381-382].

The internalization of a role seems to be greatest when people become ‘‘comfortable” in it, when they come to value the benefits that the role supplies and to believe that they can fulfill the role- expectations. An army draftee might initially hate the army and do everything he can to avoid being type-cast as a military man. Of course, his sergeant doesn’t take kindly to disobedience or a non-military manner, so he forces the recruit to ‘“shape up.’”’ Soon, the young man begins to reap some rewards from his new role. Not only does he escape punishment, but he gets passes to leave the base and finds that the young women in town just adore men in uniform. He then begins to consider all the benefits of army life—free room and board, comrade-ship, educational opportunities, and even the thought that he is serving his country. He also finds that it is not so hard to fit the army role; he scores well on marksmanship tests and learns new tasks easily. He soon becomes gung ho military.

Of course, if people don’t come to value the benefits of the role, or they believe that they can’t fulfill its requirements, problems develop. The person is not likely to internalize the role but in many cases tries to escape from its constraints, by leaving the job, for example. It has been found that, when self characteristics are incongruent with the requirements of the role, “role enactment will be poor in terms of appropriateness, effectiveness, and convincingness”’ (Allen, 1968, p. 205). Such failure further reinforces the belief that one can’t play that role. If one’s self-constructs and self-efficacy expectations contradict role requirements, escape from the role rather than internalization becomes more likely (see Sarbin & Allen, 1968; E. J. Thomas, 1968).

In sum, roles provide scripts of how we are expected to behave, and these scripts influence our behaviors. Roles thus partially define the identities we establish in social interactions and can influence our self-concepts. In turn, our self-concepts can affect the quality of role enactment and thus affect the degree to which we internalize any aspects of roles that might initially be discrepant with our self-concepts.

Basking in Reflected Glory

 Value of Desired Goals

 Most theories of motivation assert that motivation increases as a function of the value or importance of desired goals (Beck, 1983). I’m sure it doesn’t surprise you that people are more motivated to try to attain things that they view as valuable in one sense or another. This is also true of impression-motivation. Given that people think their impressions are relevant to the attainment of certain goals, they will be more motivated to impression-manage the more valuable or important the goal they wish to attain. Several factors affect the value of people’s goals. 

Availability of Resources

 In economic systems, the value of something typically increases as it becomes more scarce, and a similar principle operates in social life. As a result, impression motivation is higher when resources are scarce. You can see this easily if you imagine being interviewed for a job; in which case would you be most concerned about the impressions you make—a job for which only one other applicant was being interviewed or one for which the company was interviewing 15 people? A study by Pandey and Rastagi (1979) showed that people were more likely to ingratiate a job interviewer as competition for the job became more fierce. Similarly, I suspect that impression management to potential romantic partners increases as the pool of potential partners gets smaller. 

Characteristics of the Target

 If you’re like most people, you are probably more likely to impression manage when dealing with people who possess desirable characteristics, and this seems to be true of virtually any characteristic you might imagine. Who are you most likely to want to impress: An attractive person or an unattractive one? A person who is intelligent and competent, or one who is not very bright? A socially skilled person or a socially inept one? Someone who is likable or unlikable? Those of high status or those of low status? An individual with a pleasing personality or an individual with the personality of a planaria? Studies show that people are more likely to manage their impressions when interacting with those who are physically attractive or otherwise socially desirable (Forsyth, Riess, & Schlenker, 1977; Mori et al., 1987; Shaw & Wagner, 1975; Zanna & Pack, 1975). 

 This may be because we value the reactions of people with desirable characteristics more highly than those of less desirable people; put simply, their reactions are more valuable. For one thing, we often assume that attractive, powerful, competent, and high status people are harder to impress. Thus, when we do make a desired impression and receive affirming feedback, we feel better about it. 

 In addition, people with socially desirable attributes are often in the position to mediate important outcomes that we desire. Overall, bright, attractive, skilled, and personable people are more likely to be in positions of power and authority than stupid, unattractive, unskilled, and unpersonable ones. 

The Value of Approval

 Given that people often impression-manage to enhance others’ evaluations of them and to get social approval, we would expect people who particularly need approval or fear disapproval from others to be more motivated to manage their impressions. Because people who have recently suffered a blow to either their self-esteem or to their esteem in others’ eyes value approval more highly, failure, rejection, and embarrassment increase people’s desire for social approval and, thus, their motive to impression manage (Miller & Leary, 1992). In some cases, a person who has been publicly embarrassed in front of one person may be motivated to convey a particularly positive impression in front of someone else (Apsler, 1975). 

Although our need for approval varies across situations, some people are characteristically more concerned about receiving approval and avoiding disapproval. People who score high in fear of negative evaluation worry more about others’ evaluations of them, score higher on measures of approval-seeking, and are more concerned about making good impressions on others (Gregorich, Kemple, & Leary, 1986; Leary, 1980, 1983a; Leary, Barnes, & Griebel, 1986; Watson & Friend, 1969). Similarly, people who score high in need for approval (Crowne & Marlowe, 1964; Paulhus, 1984, 1991) are generally more motivated to control how others see them than people who are low on this trait (Dies, 1970; Jones & Tager, 1972; Leary, 1983c; Millham & Kellogg, 1980; Schneider & Turkat, 1975). 

 People who are high in fear of negative evaluation and need for approva1 tend to have higher impression motivation because they value approval more highly than people who are low on these dimensions. Because they value it more highly, they are more motivated to behave in ways that will gain approval and avoid disapproval, including self-presentation. People high in fear of negative evaluation, for example, work harder on tasks when they believe that hard work will gain them explicit approval (Watson & Friend, 1969). They also are more likely than lows to offer excuses when the possibility of negative evaluation exists (Leary et al., 1986). 

Discrepancy between Desired and Current Image

 The third factor that motivates self-presentation involves the degree of discrepancy that exists between the image one would like others to have of oneself (the desired image) and the image that others appear to hold (the current image). As long as people think they are making the kind of impression they want to make, impression-motivation should be minimal. However, to the degree that people become aware that others are not forming the impressions of them they would like, they will be motivated to manage their impressions to convey the desired images. 

 As a result, people who have made undesired impressions are particularly motivated to impression-manage. In some experiments, subjects have been led to think they failed on an important task or have been embarrassed in front of others. Both failure and embarrassment increase impression-motivation as people try to repair the damage they sustained to their social images (Apsler, 1975; Baumeister & Jones, 1978; Baumgardner, Lake, & Arkin, 1985; Brown, 1968, 1970; Brown & Garland, 1971; Leary & Schlenker, 1980; Modigliani, 1971; Schlenker, 1975; Schneider, 1969). 

 People who perceive a discrepancy between their desired and current images use a variety of self-presentational tactics in their attempts to reduce the discrepancy. For example, they may stress other positive attributes (Baumeister & Jones, 1978; Schneider, 1969) or make self-serving attributions for the events that damaged their images to begin with (Baumgardner et al., 1985; Frey, 1978; Weary & Arkin, 1981). They are also more likely to do favors for others to show what nice people they are (Apsler, 1975) and to associate themselves with other successful people (Cialdini & Richardson, 1980), hoping to “bask in reflected glory.” 

Nonconscious Self-Presentation

 People are not always aware of their motives for doing things. Although we can usually give reasons why we did this or that, the reasons we give may or may not reflect the true causes of our behavior (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). As a result, people’s behaviors are sometimes affected by self-presentational motives even though they are not consciously thinking about others’ impressions at the time and even though they may that entered into their behavior at all. 

 First, some self-presentational behaviors are performed so regularly that they become mindless habits. Although the behavior may have begun because the person consciously wanted to create a certain impression, the person now performs the behavior without consciously thinking about its self-presentational roots. For example, why do you comb your hair? Obviously, there is little reason rather than to make a better impression on other people. Yet, I doubt that you consciously think, “I’d better comb my hair so I’ll look okay today.” Similarly, we are so used to conveying positive, socially desirable impressions of ourselves that we often do so mindlessly, without consciously thinking about our self-presentational goals in doing so. 

 A second reason that people sometimes engage in self-presentational behaviors nonconsciously is that they are simply not consciously aware of the stimuli that are causing their behaviors. One experiment showed that how a subject presented himself or herself to a conversation partner clearly depended on how the conversation partner presented him- or herself: subjects who interacted with self-enhancing partners presented themselves more positively than subjects who interacted with modest partners. Yet, subjects seemed completely unaware that their own self-presentations had been influenced by those of their partners. In fact, subjects insisted that they would have presented themselves the same way in other situations as they did during the study. They seemed unaware of deliberately or strategically changing their self-presentations (Baumeister, Tice, & Hutton, 1989). Thus, people sometimes engage in self-presentational behaviors without being aware of doing so. 

**

Basking in Reflected Glory

 People want to be associated with those who are successful, powerful, attractive, popular, or otherwise esteemed in others’ eyes. By connecting themselves with those whom others admire, they can bask in reflected glory (BIRG). Sometimes, people tout their associations with noted others verbally, such as when they “drop names” or tell about their connections to movie stars, historical figures, or other famous people. Sometimes the linkages are quite loose, such as when a person recounts seeing a rock star on a New York City street or brags that a sports hero was born in his or her hometown. 

 At other times, people connect themselves to others symbolically. One common way in which people bask in reflected glory involves high-lighting their connection to successful athletic teams. By wearing team-identifying apparel, fans can associate themselves with successful teams. Of course, people wear team shirts and jackets for many different reasons. Yet, research shows that university students are more likely to wear apparel that identifies their school after the football team has won a game than after the team has lost. Furthermore, the larger the margin of victory, the more students are likely to wear school-identifying apparel (Cialdini, Borden, Thorne, Walker, Freeman, & Sloan, 1976). 

 Experimental research shows that people are more likely to tout their connections to successful others when their own public images have been threatened, and those others are successful in an area in which they themselves are deficient. They are far less likely to mention their connections to those who are deficient on the same dimensions as themselves (Cialdini et al., 1976; Cialdini & DeNicholas, 1989). 

 People also do the opposite of basking in reflected glory–they cut off reflected failure (CORF) by disassociating themselves from people of disrepute, particularly when the disreputable person’s reactions may reflect personally on them (Snyder, Higgins, & Stucky, 1983; Snyder, Lassegard, & Ford, 1986). My grandfather is the family genealogist, but I’ve always suspected that he only tells us about ancestors who were notable in some way; I have yet to hear about a single horse thief, murderer, or other reprobate in my family tree. Another common example of CORFing occurs after political elections. People who display candidates’ signs in their yards are more likely to take the sign down if the candidate they support loses the election than if their candidate wins (Bernhardt, 1993). Few people want to be publicly associated with a loser. 

 In an extreme case of CORFing, Giovanna Portapuglia, an Italian countess, was kept locked up in a room not much larger than a broom closet for nearly 50 years because her family wanted to preserve the family’s honor and dignity in the eyes of other people. When she was discovered by police in 1980, the 65-year-old woman was emaciated, mute, and mentally disturbed. The family decided to hide her from public view after an illness she had as a teenager left her “different” (“Countess was Chained,” 1980). 

BIRGing at the State and City Level

 People sometimes bask in reflected glory simply by mentioning that a famous person was born in, lived in, or was otherwise associated with their town. Occasionally, entire cities or states get in on the action as they try to bask in the reflected glory of their native sons and daughters. Most commonly, states and cities advertise the fact that a prominent person was born there–even though where famous people were born may have little to do with what they ultimately achieve. 

 I read recently that North and South Carolina have been arguing for over a century about whether Andrew Jackson, the seventh president, was born in their state. Jackson was born a few days after his mother left her home in North Carolina for her brother’s plantation in South Carolina, but experts disagree about precisely where she was when Andrew was bom. South Carolina claims that she made it to her brother’s home before the baby was bom, but North Carolina offers evidence that Andrew was born along the way in another uncle’s cabin in North Carolina The fact that North Carolina has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to strengthen its claim that Jackson was born there attests to the importance to the state’s image of being associated with a U.S. President (“Native Son?,” 1991). 

 Although both individuals and entities such as states and cities BIRG, there seems to be one difference. Individuals sometimes BIRG with well-known people regardless of whether the reason the person is well-known is for being good or bad. We seem to take nearly as much pleasure in telling others that a mass murderer lived on our street as a sports hero. In contrast, cities and states only advertise their connections with those whose claim to fame is socially desirable. For example, I doubt that New Orleans will ever erect a sign at the city limits proclaiming “Birthplace of Lee Harvey Oswald.”

Self-Presentation

 Impression Management and Interpersonal Behavior 

 Mark R. Leary

The “$6K Orphan: Washington's Legal Kidnapping Scheme

Foster raids forge orphans for federal profit.

The Raid

At 4:17 a.m. on a Tuesday in Bloomington, Illinois—crisp autumn air still clinging to the maples outside—a fist hammered the Ramirez family’s front door like the tolling of some irrevocable bell. Maria Ramirez, 34, bolted upright in her queen bed, her husband Javier already whispering fragmented prayers in the hall. Their daughters, Sofia (7) and Luna (5), stirred in the next room, dolls clutched like fragile talismans against the encroaching unknown. No warrant fluttered in the harsh flashlight beams; just badges from the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), voices sharp as shattered glass: “Open up—child endangerment.”

What unfolded was a quiet cataclysm: Drawers yanked open with clinical efficiency, the fridge rifled for signs of “neglect” (a half-empty milk carton deemed evidence enough), Sofia’s whimpers swelling into raw screams as a caseworker pried her from Javier’s desperate arms. “Mommy, why are they taking us? Did we do something bad?” Luna’s small voice pierced the chaos like a shard, lingering as the girls were bundled into the chill of a state van, destined for a stranger’s couch forty miles away. Maria collapsed against the doorframe, Javier’s sobs the only echo in the sudden void of their home. This was no crime scene, no fevered nightmare—yet it evoked that heart-pounding, nausea-inducing mind fuck of terror, a modern-day Hitchcockian nightmare unraveling where innocence meets the gavel’s indifferent fall.

This is the hidden machinery of what I’ve come to call the $6K Child racket—a federal fraud factory where safe homes are stripped bare for reimbursement dollars, transforming the quiet bonds of family into prosecutable poverty. The “$6K Child” isn’t jargon; it’s the stark arithmetic of incentive, the approximate federal “entry bounty” states pocket upon placing a child in foster care, a kickstart to the annual reimbursements that can swell to $25,000 or more per head. It’s the poison pill at the heart of a system that rewards rupture over repair, orphaning not just bodies but the very soul of childhood. Maria’s story, though, is the quiet thunder that follows—where one family’s quiet defiance begins to fracture the facade.

The Poison Pill: CAPTA’s Toxic Legacy

It began, as so many American tragedies do, with the whisper of good intentions laced through the halls of a Watergate-shadowed Congress. On March 13, 1973, Senator Walter F. Mondale—then a rising Minnesota Democrat, voice of the heartland’s quiet crusaders—introduced S.1191, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), a bipartisan salve for a nation still tender from revelations of hidden cruelties in homes and headlines alike. Hailed as a bulwark against the unthinkable, it poured federal millions into state coffers for hotlines, training, and shelters—tools to identify and treat, not evict. Erin Pizzey, the trailblazing founder of the world’s first domestic-violence refuge, glimpsed in it a fragile dawn: Protect the fragile without pulverizing the family. Six months after Nixon’s ‘73 veto of broader child welfare (a casualty of his fiscal hawks), the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee forged ahead, delivering PL 93-247 to the Oval Office. On January 31, 1974, the President—embattled, yet unbowed—affixed his signature, marking CAPTA’s birth as the first national torch against child maltreatment

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Yet woven into this act’s noble weave was a subtler venom, one that would course like slow poison through the veins of policy. Federal matching funds—75% for investigations, unlocked by mandatory reporting—tethered salvation to scrutiny, birthing a machinery where probes proliferated unchecked. States, hungry for grants, inflated caseloads tenfold by 1985, transforming poverty’s whisper into peril’s roar. No caps on the hunt, but a cruel asymmetry: Prevention via Title IV-B? Bottled at meager allotments, even as removals flowed free. This calls out “all the co-conspirators... exposing ugly truths to corrode the corrupt $100-billion-a-year American divorce cartel—more focused on keeping money flowing than on the best interests of our children.”

The metastasis came six years later, in the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980, a Carter-era codex scripted in the House by Rep. James Corman, a California Democrat championing the underclass through Ways and Means. Introduced April 4, 1979, as H.R.3434, it birthed Title IV-E: Open-ended federal reimbursements for foster care - 50-83% matches on boarding, therapy, the bureaucratic churn - averaging $25,000 per child annually, with that fateful $6,000 “entry bounty” as the gateway toll.

Signed June 17, 1980, it promised “permanency” bonuses ($4,000-12,000 per adoption) to stem the foster drift, yet rigged the scales: Uncapped dollars for out-of-home exile, time-bound scraps for in-home healing. The scam unfurled like a ledger’s dark arithmetic, a syndicate’s sleight-of-hand where broad “neglect” certifications - triggered by evictions, ER fevers, or a sitter’s fleeting shadow - unlocked billions in IV-E flows, swelling to $8B+ yearly by 2025, while prevention languished under IV-B’s $200M ceiling.

Removals surged 33% in the act’s wake, with predatory incursions into low-income zip codes spiking 70%, turning forgotten corners into fertile ground for federal harvest. And in the subsidy shadows, fraud bloomed unchecked: Adoptive parents hoarding blood-money checks for “disrupted” bonds, siphoning $100M+ as bewildered children cycled back into the churn—a grotesque carousel of cash disguised as care. What Mondale and Corman forged as shield became syndicate: A $100 billion hydra where “best interest” bends to best billing, CAPTA’s vial of venom injected into the Adoption Act’s eager vein.

The Human Toll: Data That Bleeds

To grasp the wreckage, one must linger in the ledgers, where cold numerals pulse with the warmth of stolen mornings. In 2023 alone, 176,340 children cascaded into foster care—a relentless tide of 483 souls severed daily from the rhythms of home, yanked not always from peril but from the frayed edges of circumstance: an eviction notice, a midnight ER visit for fever, a mandated reporter’s fleeting suspicion. This is the echo of CAPTA’s half-century shadow, entries cresting at 267,000 in 2000 before a scandal-scarred dip of 33%—yet the scars endure, etched into 24 million American children, fully a third of our youth, adrift in single-parent homes that Warren Farrell has mourned as the quiet cradle of crisis.

Estimates paint a broader devastation: Thousands of children - upward of 4,000 on the most harrowing days, per advocacy tallies - lose meaningful contact with a parent each day in the zero-sum arena of family courts, their worlds cleaved by rulings that prioritize procedure over presence. Not mere statistics, these are mornings without pancakes, bedrooms echoing with absence, the slow erosion of trust that festers into lifelong fractures. Consider the ripple: Over a year, that’s more than 1.4 million ruptures, each a thread pulled from the nation’s fraying tapestry.

America, for all its professed guardianship of the innocent, leads the world in this quiet orphaning—not through malice alone, but through mandates that conflate risk with ruin. Poverty probes inflate removals by 70% in low-income enclaves, per forensic audits from the Barton Institute, transforming “best interest” into best billing. In the hush of my book The Respondent, I mapped this not as anomaly, but as alchemy: The courtrooms where children are “kidnapped in plain sight,” their parental rights upended under a system’s unblinking gaze. It is a toll that bleeds not red, but the deeper crimson of potential—lives ledgered away, one dawn raid at a time.

Defiance in the Dark: The Ramirez Reunion

2

Maria Ramirez was no headline maker until the headlines found her. A line cook in Bloomington, piecing together $32,000 a year amid the grind of double shifts, her file was born of a whisper: A mandated reporter’s tip about Javier’s overtime leaving the girls with a sitter twice weekly. No bruises marred their skin, no shadows of belts or blows, just a fridge audit flagging “insufficient proteins,” a poverty tax disguised as prudence. The dawn raid that followed was surgical: Girls spirited away, Maria bound by a no-contact order, her days dissolving into a haze of court dates and CPS “service plans” - parenting classes she juggled at the cost of wages she couldn’t spare.

For two years, the machine ground on, relentless, its web of “unfortunate outcomes”- judges, mediators, social workers tangled in dysfunction. Then came the fracture…

Enter Lena Vasquez, Bloomington’s understated sentinel against DCFS overreach, who had already liberated five families that year through the fine art of evidentiary jujitsu. Vasquez unearthed the rot: A caseworker’s bonuses tethered to placements, leaked emails whispering of quota pressures from on high. “They didn’t raid for rescue,” Maria confides now, her voice a quiet thunder over a shared Zoom screen, “they raided for revenue.” Sofia had ceased her drawings, those vibrant bursts of crayon childhood; Luna posed the unanswerable: “Are we bad forever, Mommy?” The home, once alive with laughter, echoed with what the experts term “living grief”—holidays as hollow rituals, birthdays shadowed by ghosts, the extended-family brutality that targets the resilient.

The hearing unfolded like a drama long deferred: Neighbors’ affidavits painting a portrait of thriving (”The girls were the light of our block”), pay stubs dismantling the myth of instability, even Sofia’s school counselor’s tender testimony: “The trauma of removal wounded deeper than any imagined risk at home.” The judge’s gavel fell as grace - a full reunification, DCFS sanctioned for $15,000 in restitution.

Today, the Ramirez’s weave “reunion picnics” into their weekends, mending the brutal severances that ripple through extended kin, much like the quiet wars of alienation I chronicled in my own fractured nights. Maria’s refrain carries the weight of survival: “They dimmed our light, but we became the flame.” One victory begets a chorus; Vasquez’s caseload swells with the emboldened, a subterranean rebellion etching cracks in the cartel’s unyielding stone.

Cracking the Cartel: Bills, Petitions, and the Dawn
Yet even in this engineered twilight - where dawn raids shatter the innocent like fragile eggshells under boot heels, and ledgers tally the lost as mere line items in a profit parade - glimmers of reckoning pierce the gloom of 2025, fragile as the first light filtering through a cracked courtroom blind, catching the dust motes of forgotten teddy bears and crumpled crayon drawings. These are the slivers of dawn for children who wake screaming from nightmares that are all too real, for families whose laughter has been audited into silence, their holiday tables set for ghosts, their bedtime stories rewritten as case files stamped with “endangerment.”

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President Trump’s November executive order, a blunt instrument forged in the fires of belated fury, modernizes the fractured pipeline of foster transitions, funneling $500 million into the starved veins of youth autonomy and kin-first placements. No longer shall aunts clutch empty doorframes, their whispers of lullabies lost to the state’s cold calculus; no longer shall cousins become strangers, their shared blood dismissed as an inconvenient variable in the bounty equation. This decree dares to utter the radical heresy that once echoed in every nursery rhyme: Blood ties, not bureaucratic bounties, must anchor the uprooted - those tiny hands reaching for the familiar curve of a mother’s neck, the steady rhythm of a father’s heartbeat, the unbreakable weave of siblings tangled in a single blanket fort.

Echoing that defiant pulse, H.R. 2438’s Foster Tax Credits rise like a battering ram against adoption’s ironclad fiscal walls, slashing the barriers that have turned grandmothers into spectral visitors peering through visitation glass, uncles into footnotes in a stranger’s file, and the sacred circle of family into a shattered mandala of strangers. Meanwhile, Title IV-B’s renewal surges prevention coffers by $200 million - a tentative but tenacious tide, swelling against the relentless flood of removals that has drowned safe homes in suspicion for half a century, where a half-empty milk carton becomes grounds for exile, and a father’s overtime shift a verdict of neglect. These are not mere line items in a congressional ledger, etched in the indifferent ink of policy wonks; they are lifelines, fragile threads spun from the raw silk of a child’s first word, a family’s whispered “I love you” across a courtroom divide - clawing back the incentives that have monetized misery, transforming CAPTA’s noble intent into a half-century shadow play of profit over protection, where the wail of a toddler torn from her crib echoes louder than any gavel’s fall.

But glimmers demand guardians, for in the quiet hours when the raids recede and the ledgers close, it is the children who bear the unledgerable weight - their trust fractured like a dropped porcelain doll, their futures shadowed by the PTSD that claims 85% of these stolen souls, one silent scream at a time. One child killed every six days in the custody wars that the system ignites, their tiny graves unmarked footnotes in the $100 billion feast. Families have paid the ultimate price too long - their mornings hollowed by the echo of absent footsteps, their holidays haunted by chairs pulled empty at the feast, their hopes ledgered into oblivion under a system that rewards rupture over repair, pitting love against law in a zero-sum slaughter where a parent’s plea is drowned by the chime of federal reimbursements.

The $100 billion American Divorce Machine - this hydra of hollowed hearts - feasts on our frayed familial fabric, devouring the gold standard of childhood: that unbreakable under-one-roof sanctuary where fathers toss sons skyward and mothers braid daughters’ dreams, where the world outside fades to the safe harbor of shared breaths and secrets. But not anymore. From the shadowed corridors of Chiswick refuges, where Erin Pizzey first sheltered the storm-battered only to watch the storm summoned anew, to the emptied bedrooms of Bloomington, where Sofia’s crayons lie gathering dust and Luna’s questions hang unanswered - ”Are we bad forever, Mommy?” - from my sons’ unspoken pact across the void to your unyielding roar in the face of this engineered orphaning, we rise. Not as victims, their playthings in a profit parade, but as the dawn itself - fierce, unrelenting, reclaiming the hearth one ignited heartbeat at a time.

Greg Ellis
https://substack.com/redirect/47da87d4-c261-42ff-a6aa-623a302e3926?j=eyJ1IjoiMXBvcTY0In0.bpX_Ri4UrVVzEcwn2tPJZmntoRqzSx0aLRc9mOX6Iw8

If we can take a break from complaining about women, we might consider a truly serious (but largely hidden) consequence of feminism: the child protection gestapo, which specializes in tearing children from their parents. As Greg Ellis indicates, this contributed to the creation of the divorce machinery and affects fathers far more than mothers, though both are targets, and of course the main victims are children. Without action, this gendarmerie is the future feminism has in store for all of us.

Trump’s recent Executive Order may help, but it will have zero effect if not followed up. We cannot count on the tradcons or even the alternative media. Ellis provides some background, and more can be found in my books, Taken Into Custody and The New Politics of Sex (StephenBaskerville.com).

Divorce-Court Demolition

The Respondent: Exposing the Cartel of Family Law
by Greg Ellis
Köehler Books
240 pp., $17.95

If Americans understood how crooked their courts really are, they would not be surprised at the current travesties of justice—like concocting patently groundless quasi-criminal accusations against former President Donald Trump and everyone associated with him. Commandeering the public justice system to wreak vengeance on our personal or political enemies did not start with judicial grandees sitting atop the commanding heights of our august federal courts.

No, as Greg Ellis shows in The Respondent, perverting justice for private gain and public tyranny was refined by what even the high-minded jurisprudential aristocracy look down upon as lowlife hacks who administer the ethical cesspool of family law. In fact, today’s vendettas against Trump are rendered possible and plausible only by decades of judicial persecution of ordinary, defenseless citizens.

Ellis, a prominent Hollywood actor who played supporting roles in the Pirates of the Caribbean and the new Star Trek franchises, was caught up in the family court wringer after being anonymously accused of planning some unspecified future “harm” to his own children. Without warning, he was summarily questioned—without a lawyer—by police, handcuffed, forcibly removed from his home. He was interrogated again behind closed doors, kept from his children, plundered of almost everything he possessed, rendered unemployable, incarcerated in a psychiatric facility, and left homeless. His young children were also interrogated with leading questions suggesting, without evidence, that he had sexually molested them.

All standard procedure in family law. Presuming people guilty and ruining their lives is all in a day’s work. Similar accounts more obscure (because not written by Hollywood stars) in self-published books, unpublished articles, rejected civil-rights suits, social media discussions corroborate this one—and some of those accounts make this one look relatively mild.

And they are true. I can say this not only because I have read and heard thousands of such accounts or because I have witnessed some in person. When one understands the politics driving family law courts and dictating the twisted ethics therein, one quickly grasps that their perverted rules constitute an open invitation to inflict persecution and plunder on people like Ellis and others. The procedures we permit make it impossible for these abuses not to be happening. In fact, no one denies that it is all routine. They simply cover it with euphemism and launch personal attacks against anyone who criticizes.

No-fault divorce did not remove “acrimony” from family law or any other legal process, and it was never intended to do so. No-fault justice simply eliminated the rule of law in the United States by allowing legal proceedings against innocent people—citizens neither charged nor suspected of any legal wrongdoing, who can be made to feel the full force of the penal apparatus, minus the standard safeguards enjoyed by accused criminals. Courts that launch legal actions against private citizens without telling them their infraction (“fault”) are dispensing not justice but systematized injustice and tyranny. That the main tools of their peculiar trade are other people’s children renders those courts to be nothing less than horror chambers. Ellis experienced the logical result. Once we crossed this line into legal nihilism, the degeneration of the justice system into an extortion racket became inevitable.

Ellis found himself in a Kafkaesque nightmare, where guilt is determined and punishments like expropriation and incarceration are inflicted not by rules of evidence and due process of law but by psychotherapists spouting psychobabble and by social workers implementing the ideology they learned in women’s studies courses. It is a world where having family members incarcerated without trial is not only possible but rewarded as a shrewd litigation strategy. It is a legal underworld where no punishment is so unjust, cruel, or unusual that it cannot be rationalized as being “in the best interest of the child.”

So much destruction proceeds from the government’s divorce machine that the damage is difficult to convey in less space than a book. The foundational institutions of our civilization are all eviscerated: marriage, family, privacy, freedom, constitutional government, professional ethics, social stability, and economic solvency.

The catastrophe is so massive on so many fronts that enumerating them is like battling a Hydra. There are ruined lives, severed relationships, and emotional horrors inflicted on innocent people, especially children. There is the social anomie in communities where millions of fatherless youth grow into delinquents, dropouts, addicts, criminals, derelicts, terrorists (yes, school shooters too), plus the next generation of single mothers. There is the massive expansion in the size and scope of government, including bureaucracies for law enforcement, incarceration, health, education, and housing. There is the open violation of almost every constitutional safeguard and civil liberty by the very courts that exist to protect those rights. There is the perversion of professionals like lawyers, psychotherapists, and social workers into lackeys and bureaucratic gangsters. And there is the cowardice bred into all of us, as we studiously look the other way.

Ellis himself genuflects to political correctness perhaps too often in some of his language, but it would be wrong to hold this against him. Writers on this topic know that most publishers and editors demand such weasel words. Instead, readers should appreciate how Ellis slips in the truth in all its horror. This often takes the form of pithy phrases: family court is “a state-sanctioned kidnapping campaign,” he writes in one chapter titled, “The Mass Kidnapping of American Children.” Elsewhere, he writes that private investigators “commit crimes for lawyers who don’t want dirt on their hands.” At one point, he observes accurately that “the courts determined a need to reward the parent who brings in the business with a finder’s fee.” And he quotes other victims to the effect that “the whole thing is … a system of organized crime.”

Some points merit more attention, like his discovery that social workers “had threatened Dana [his wife] with taking our boys and placing them into foster care if she did not immediately procure a restraining order and file for divorce.” This may not excuse her taking advantage of the corrupt system, but it does illustrate that women too become its prisoners. Having enlisted social workers to eliminate the fathers, many mothers find that the goons then remove the children from them as well.

Psychotherapy figures prominently throughout this book in various ways. The Soviet Union pioneered the weaponization of legal and mental health systems to suppress dissent. Yet American courts have devised even more creative techniques. Gratuitous evaluations, never justified in the first place, gave Ellis an unequivocal clean bill of mental health but were withheld from him and his lawyers and summarily dismissed by judges. Ellis also engages in voluntary self-analysis, using candor to rationalize the abuses he experienced.

Ellis sometimes gives divorce operatives the benefit of the doubt, but his own account belies any suggestion that they deserve it. At one point, he suggests that “judges who are better educated” might help. But no amount of education will change these operatives’ well-honed ways. They are not ignorant or poorly trained (and they are certainly not “underfunded,” as they self-servingly claim). They know precisely what they are doing, because they are the beneficiaries of their scam, and they enact it with ruthless efficiency.

Early on in his travails, Ellis suspected that his lawyers were not working in his interest. Attorneys exchanged daily letters over nothing, driving up their fees. Ellis made some 80 court appearances—none serving any purpose other than fees for lawyers and other hangers-on. His lawyers coached him to recite a script of exact words and phrases and told him that was “just how things were done.” In other words, just rulings were not an option, because the proceedings were scripted and outcomes pre-determined. Robert Seidenberg corroborates Ellis’s experience in a chapter of his book, The Father’s Emergency Guide to Divorce-Custody Battle (1997), titled “Your Lawyer, Your Enemy.”

It would be a shame if this important work followed others like it into obscurity, such as the book by Ellis’s colleague Alec Baldwin, A Promise to Ourselves: A Journey Through Fatherhood and Divorce (2008). First-rate journalists have also risked their careers to expose family court scandals, including Melanie Phillips of Britain’s Daily Mail, John Waters at The Irish Times, Donna Laframboise at Canada’s National Post, and the late Phyllis Schlafly in her book, Who Killed the American Family?

We are now seeing the results of ignoring this horror for decades. No nation can remain free that harbors within itself an underworld of legal tyranny—or that raises its children according to such principles.

Stephen Baskerville
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/reviews/divorce-court-demolition/

The Mystery of Life Origin

 FOREWORD Robert J. Marks and John West

In 1984, three courageous scientists—Charles  Thaxton,  Walter Bradley, and  Roger Olsen—published a rigorous reassessment of then-current scientific theories about the origin of life.  Published by the Philosophical Library (the publisher of works by Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, and many other eminent scientists and thinkers), The Mystery of Life’s Origins challenged the scientific orthodoxy of the time and provoked significant interest in the scientific community. Long-time NASA scientist Robert  Jastrow hailed the book as “a very well thought-out and clearly written analysis,” while  Robert Shapiro, Professor of Chemistry at New York University, lauded it as “an important contribution to the origin of life field.”

The book’s core message was startling: Current approaches to the origin of life were abysmal failures, and wholesale re-thinking was required. As the authors put it:

the difficulty is fundamental. It applies equally to discarded, present, and possible future models of chemical evolution. We believe the problem is analogous to that of the medieval alchemist who was commissioned to change copper into gold... You can’t get gold out of copper, apples out of oranges, or information out of negative thermal entropy. There does not seem to be any physical basis for the widespread assumption implicit in the idea that an open system is a sufficient explanation for the complexity of life.

At the end of the book, the authors suggested that the origin of life might have required what philosopher Michael  Polanyi called “a profoundly informative intervention” or what they themselves called an “ intelligent cause.” Most scientists of the time did not want to hear that revolutionary proposal; but the authors’ words inspired a new generation of scientists and scholars who were dedicated to seeking evidence of purpose and  intelligent design throughout nature.

By republishing The Mystery of Life’s Origin on the occasion of its 35th anniversary, we seek to recognize the signal accomplishment of its original authors, plus the hard work of  Jon Buell of the  Foundation for Thought and Ethics, who helped bring the book to reality. In the new introduction by  David Klinghoffer, you will get to read the behind-the-scenes story of how the book came to be written—and the transformative impact it had on many. The original text has been lightly updated. The fact that only light updating was needed is a testament to the meticulous scholarship of the authors and to the enduring nature of the problem they identified in origin of life studies.

Although the text of the original Mystery of Life’s Origin forms the first part of this volume, this book is much more than an historical appreciation. Its second half, “The State of the Debate,” includes new chapters assessing the state of origin of life research today by chemist  James Tour of Rice University, physicist  Brian Miller, astronomer  Guillermo Gonzalez, biologist  Jonathan Wells, and philosopher of science  Stephen C. Meyer. Those who want to understand not only the history of science’s quest to understand the origin of life, but its current status, will find this book an invaluable guide.

(...)

INTRODUCTION:  INTELLIGENT DESIGN’S ORIGINAL EDITION David Klinghoffer

How does life emerge from that which is not alive? This elicit mystery exercises a peculiar fascination, with the power to elicit remarkable feats of imagination. As the novelist Mary Shelley recalled, her invention of the story of  Frankenstein traced back to conversations she witnessed between Lord Byron and her husband  Percy Shelley. Holidaying in Switzerland in the summer of 1816, they spoke late into the night, past the “witching hour,” about “the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated.” Up for discussion was gossip about “experiments of  Dr. Darwin” (Erasmus, the grandfather of Charles) who “by some extraordinary means” produced “voluntary motion” in a length of spaghetti. The poets alluded to “galvanism,” electrical experiments by  Luigi Galvani, spurring thoughts that “a corpse would be reanimated.”1 Later, sleepless in her bed, Mrs. Shelley would experience a vision, receiving the seed for one of the great horror novels.

Less horrific but hardly less imaginative are scenarios of unguided “chemical evolution,” or abiogenesis, featured in high school and college biology textbooks, taken as gospel by the media and preached as such by a range of authoritative popular and scholarly figures in the culture. Simple experimental work by  Louis Pasteur in the early 1860s demonstrated that life does not spontaneously generate itself, not from spaghetti, not from anything. Instead, life comes from life. How then may science explain the origin of the very first life?

 Charles Darwin in 1871 famously speculated in a letter to  Joseph Hooker, “But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity etcetera present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes.”2 The “warm little pond” generating “protein compounds” is not far off from textbook orthodoxy today. Students are taught that a prebiotic soup gave rise to key biotic chemicals, amino acids, stimulated by atmospheric electricity—galvanism in a modern guise—as demonstrated in the famed  Miller-Urey experiment of 1952. One feat of imagination here lies in conceiving by what “extraordinary means” such building blocks came together, unguided, in precisely the right order to give rise to biological information, the digital code of DNA and RNA, that underlies all life on Earth.

In 1969, San Francisco State University biologist  Dean Kenyon would give the theory of chemical evolution its then most up-to-date presentation, in an influential text,  Biochemical Predestination. By 1984, Kenyon had abandoned the theory altogether in favor of what would later be called intelligent design. His public confession of apostasy came in the Foreword of a short yet remarkable book, The Mystery of Life’s Origin: Reassessing Current Theories, by chemist  Charles B. Thaxton, materials scientist  Walter L. Bradley, and geochemist  Roger L. Olsen.  Discovery Institute Press is delighted to offer this new version of the book, the Ur-text or original edition of the modern theory of intelligent design, along with supplementary essays by scholars updating and extending the work. These new chapters, by synthetic organic chemist James Tour, physicist Brian Miller, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez, biologist Jonathan Wells, and philosopher of biology Stephen Meyer, present the current state of the debate that Thaxton and his co-authors sparked in 1984. The enigma they identified remains, hardly resolved by further technical research amplified and distorted by press releases and hysterical headlines, but rather, if anything, compounded as science has advanced.

For anyone familiar with today’s  intelligent design theory, to read The Mystery of Life’s Origin is to experience a powerful sense of déjà vu. Surely we have walked these halls before. Or rather, Mystery is the hall down which ID walked before it emerged into history as “intelligent design.” The now familiar phrase appears nowhere in the text. But other phrases, persons, and motifs, the stock-in-trade of the modern ID theorist, are present. That is most notably, thickly so in the book’s Epilogue, authored by Dr. Thaxton, where the technical details are left behind and a forthright argument for a design hypothesis is offered. Stephen Meyer has been forthcoming about his intellectual debt to Thaxton. In a sense, Mystery is a daring first draft of what would become Meyer’s own work, especially in  Signature in the Cell. Here we have the “principle of uniformity,”3 “the present is a key to the past,”4 adducing what “we know by experience” about how “intelligent investigators” act,5 the role of the “idea of creation” in the “origin of modern science,”6 the injunction to “follow the evidence where it leads,”7 how “certain effects always have intelligent causes,”8 Shannon information,  Michael Polanyi, “ specified complexity,”9 taking Darwin himself as a historical precedent in one’s argumentation, conceiving of the search for truth about biological origins as akin to the work of a detective in a murder mystery, and more.

A separate article could be written tracing the influence of such themes from Thaxton, Bradley, and Olsen on Meyer alone, reflected in his books including the forthcoming  The Return of the  God Hypothesis. That last formulation, the “God hypothesis,” first used by Meyer in the title of a 1999 essay in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, itself appears in the Epilogue of Mystery.10 Thaxton uses it to contrast different theaters of scientific investigation, “ operation science” versus “ origin science,” where consideration of a transcendent intelligent agent as being at work in causing certain events either doesn’t belong at all, or might in fact be permissible. In Signature in the Cell, Meyer would later write that this “terminology” was “admittedly cumbersome.”11 For “origin science” he substitutes “historical science.”

When I spoke to Thaxton recently, he explained that the “God hypothesis” was simply the shorthand way professors talked about the idea when Thaxton was a post-doctoral student at Harvard in the philosophy of science. Other key ID concepts and habits of thought came to him from this same period in his post-PhD studies. For example, looking to Darwin as a model or precedent for one’s arguments, as Meyer does, was something he picked up from historian of science  Reijer Hooykaas (1906–1994), whom he came to know at this time. “ Uniformitarianism” is via the geologist  Charles Lyell (1797–1875), but Hooykaas wrote a book about it in 1963,  The Principle of Uniformity in Geology, Biology, and Theology. Shannon information was from information theorist  Hubert Yockey (1916–2016), referring to mathematician  Claude Shannon (1916–2001), and “specified complexity,” now much associated with mathematician and intelligent design proponent  William Dembski, from chemist  Leslie Orgel (1927–2007). The advice to “follow the evidence where it leads,” or as it is sometimes found, “We must follow the argument wherever it leads,” a staple of writers on intelligent design, is a paraphrase from Socrates in Plato’s Republic. In Allan Bloom’s translation (394d), “[W]herever the argument, like a wind, tends, thither must we go.”12In other words, the interest of The Mystery of Life’s Origin lies partly in the question of an idea’s origin. Meyer and Thaxton form a link with scientific and philosophical investigations of the 20th century, the 19th century, and before, much as intelligent design more broadly connects Greek philosophy, especially  Anaxagoras (5th century B.C.), with the thinking of Darwin’s colleague turned rival,  Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913). Without going into needless detail, or searching too far back into the past, this Introduction will sketch some of the immediate historical background behind the writing of Mystery and its subsequent influence on the evolution of the theory of ID.

It is impossible to fully disentangle the study of biological origins from reflections and speculations of a theological nature. Proponents of Darwinian evolution habitually advance arguments about God in support of their theory: “God, if he exists, and there seems to be no reason to think he does, surely wouldn’t have done it this way.” Much of the curiosity we feel about how life originated similarly derives from the observation that a purely naturalistic explanation is not what a theist would expect, and an explanation incorporating design or teleology is not what a materialist or an atheist would expect. Today, some of the most prominent exponents of  neo-Darwinism are also outspoken and evangelizing atheists. Which is fair enough. That fact by itself does not invalidate their scientific thinking. So there is no shock or scandal in the fact that the idea for the book that became The Mystery of Life’s Origin was first discussed among a group of friends and colleagues affiliated with  Probe Ministries, operated by  Jon Buell and his associate  James Williams to advocate a Christian worldview. Buell would go on in 1981 to launch the  Foundation for Thought and Ethics, in Dallas, Texas, publishing books on scientific, historical, and ethical subjects. This publishing work was absorbed in 2016 as an imprint of Discovery Institute Press.

Buell knew Mystery co-author Walter Bradley from Bradley’s days as a PhD student at the University of Texas. In 1975, Buell was seeking an author for a rigorous book on evolution, and he proposed it to Bradley, then a professor at the Colorado School of Mines. Bradley wasn’t interested in that focus, so he made a counter-proposal: a book on the origin of life. As he told Discovery Institute’s  John West in an interview, he suspected that could be the “ultimate barrier to this whole question of life and evolution,” the “hardest step,” “how you get started from scratch”—meaning, life from nonlife.13 The study of the origin of life is by necessity multidisciplinary. It joins biology to fields with which Bradley’s expertise, materials science, is more closely linked: biochemistry, physical chemistry, chemical kinetics, thermodynamics. “Interestingly enough,” he says, “most of the people that I have met, who are doing work as biologists, seldom know very much about what I think of as more fundamental and theoretical chemistry. And so a lot of what they do is pretty qualitative.”

Qualitative speculation was what Bradley wanted to avoid. Talking and teaching about the subject, including a 1974 guest lecture he gave on “Thermodynamics and the Origin of Life” at Colorado State University, convinced him he was onto something. One key question, the atmosphere of the early Earth, seemed to call for training in another field: geochemistry. For this, he sought out the collaboration of a co-author,  Roger Olsen, then a PhD student in geochemistry at the Colorado School of Mines. “Some of the ideas of what people would want to believe about  abiogenesis are very dependent on what the initial atmosphere was like,” Bradley recalls of his thinking at the time. “For example, if you have too much oxygen, then there’s no hope.” Olsen’s research could shed light on this. “Roger concluded that we never did have a reducing atmosphere,” as the  Miller-Urey experiment assumed, an assumption that “didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell.” An oxidizing atmosphere spelled doom for life’s presumed chemical forerunners.

Bradley and Olsen had been working on their origin-of-life manuscript for six months when  Charles Thaxton moved down to Dallas from Boston, where he had done post-doctoral studies at Harvard and Brandeis Universities, in the history of science and molecular biology, respectively. The text of The Mystery of Life’s Origin furnishes a single brief autobiographical reference, in the Epilogue, but it is an intriguing one. It reflects Thaxton’s experience: “When we are asked to consider ‘far out’ or ‘strange’ ideas such as  Special Creation, as were the authors just a few years ago, typically the response is exactly that mentioned by [David] Bohm as cited earlier.” This response is one of “violent disturbance.” Moreover, “The process… can sometimes be painful (it was to one of the authors) but the quest for truth has never been easy, and has on more than a few occasions been known to make one unpopular.”14Thaxton, introduced to religious faith by his mother, had in college gone through a period of disbelief. Scientific knowledge seemed to crowd out any role for a deity. It was as a graduate student in physical chemistry at Iowa State that he first delved into the problem of abiogenesis. Until that point, he had thought that chemistry fully accounted for life’s origins. The assumption turned out to be too simple. The pain and disturbance he referred to in the book was, first, the feeling of having betrayed his mother, and, second, the feeling of having betrayed those who looked to him as respectable materialist.

 After moving to Dallas with his wife and first son, Thaxton went to work with Jon Buell. It was late 1975, and, as Thaxton told John West in an interview, “Buell came in one day and presented me with a manuscript that he’d had on his desk.”15 It was by Walter Bradley and Roger Olsen, the first draft of what would become The Mystery of Life’s Origin. “So I read through it,” Thaxton says, “and my first reaction was, wow, this is kind of interesting. But why is there not more chemistry in it?” He noted this objection to Buell, who invited him to come on a visit to meet with Bradley and Olsen in College Station, Texas, where by this time Bradley had moved to teach at Texas A&M. In Bradley’s living room, they discussed the book, and Buell encouraged Thaxton to share his reservation about the dearth of chemistry. Bradley and Olsen both almost simultaneously spoke up and said, “Well, you’re the chemist. You write it!”

And that is essentially what he did. Bradley was teaching and the now Dr. Olsen had switched to private industry. Thaxton was the “fresh man” on the project with the time to further develop the book. “I had a lot of studying to do, and I did,” he says. “Night and day for weeks and weeks and months, and it turned into several years in fact, before it was all done.” Olsen had written about the atmosphere of the early Earth in Chapter 5 (“Reassessing the Early Earth and Its Atmosphere”), while Bradley wrote Chapters 7, 8, and 9 (“Thermodynamics of Living Systems,” “Thermodynamics and the Origin of Life,” and “Specifying How Work Is to Be Done”). “Then Thaxton wrote the majority of the rest of it,” according to Bradley, including the Epilogue which departs from pure scientific discussion and drew most of the fire once the book came out.

One problem was that the chapters seemed to reflect different voices, different terminologies and ways of arguing. As Thaxton recalls, it needed to be largely rewritten to sound “like a science book, not an engineering book.” So, “I redid the whole manuscript, just started from scratch, just started over. And we completely went through that process at least two or three times.” By 1978, it was done, and ready to be sent for scientific review, by a dozen or more scientists, some friendly to the thesis, others unfriendly.

One prominent scientist specializing in the origin-of-life field, presumed to be unfriendly but a fair critic nonetheless, was Dean Kenyon. Kenyon, exchanging letters with Thaxton in 1981, had read the book in its manuscript form and was interested enough to invite Buell and Thaxton to visit with him. They flew to San Francisco for the meeting. Thaxton did not know at the time that Kenyon had privately come to doubt his own chemical evolutionary theory.

“My stomach was all the way up in my throat as we sat in Kenyon’s office that day,” Thaxton recalls. “I remember asking him what he thought of the book.” In response, Kenyon fixed him with a stern look, then smiled and said, “I thought it was terrific.” This emboldened Thaxton, for he had come with an additional plan, beyond asking Kenyon for his view of their work. He was going to ask Kenyon to write the Fore-word. He plunged in. “Well, then why don’t you write the Foreword to the book?” Thaxton asked. “And he said, ‘Well, I was hoping you would ask.’”

In the opinion of historian Ronald Numbers, in his book The Creationists, Kenyon’s contribution, a leading origin-of-life theorist “confessing that he no longer believed in naturalistic evolution,” was the “most striking feature of their book.”16 As Kenyon wrote, “It is very likely that research on life’s origins will move in somewhat different directions once the professionals have read this important work.” He concludes, “All scientists interested in the origin-of-life problem would do well to study this book carefully and to evaluate their own work in the light of its arguments.”17 Such an endorsement, for the three authors, was a coup that almost could not be topped.

The process of reviewing having been completed and needed changes having been made, it was time to seek a publisher. This task fell to  Jon Buell. The goal was to reach a secular audience, not a religious one, and the style of the book indicates as much. To be strictly avoided, says Thaxton, was anything that sounded remotely “religious.” He notes, “We wanted to make sure we weren’t preaching.” Yet finding a publisher was no simple matter. Then as now, the faintest hint of “creationism” was enough to set teeth on edge, even though the Thaxton book clearly did not support creationism in its most precise meaning of recruiting science on behalf of Biblical literalism. It probably did not help that a prominent Supreme Court case involving “creation science,”  McLean v. Arkansas, was being argued about this time, in 1981. The case was decided in January 1982, finding that teaching creationism in public schools violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

As of late 1982, Buell was still in search of a publisher. Cornell University Press and MIT Press had both expressed initial interest, with “almost identical” final results, as Thaxton recalls. At Cornell, two internal reviewers read the book and delivered a split opinion, in favor and against. So a third was called in, a prominent scientist. Thaxton wonders if it was  Carl Sagan. The acquisitions editor involved,  Eric Halpern, wrote to Buell with the bad news, indicating that, “As you will see, the report falls far short of giving us the basis for a favorable recommendation to our faculty Board.”18 The “masked” report is indeed scathing, blasting the book for its “superficial” arguments, though interesting in how it shows how little has changed in conventional thinking about life’s origin over the past four decades. The anonymous Cornell reviewer harrumphs, “Because the experiments have not yet produced a cell in the laboratory it is unrealistic to dismiss the effort.” Researchers are still saying the same today, in very similar terms. Astronomer  Abraham Loeb at Harvard, for one, writing in 2019 in Scientific American, considers the prospects of “produc[ing] synthetic life out of raw chemicals” in the lab, but concedes “even if we dismiss these prospects as unrealistic with our current technologies, another civilization that happened to be billions of years more technologically advanced than we are might have” done so.19By return mail on  Foundation for Thought and Ethics letterhead, Thaxton responded to Halpern, noting that while expert review was only to be expected from a university publisher, “it is difficult to escape the feeling that we have been sandbagged by someone who feels threatened by criticisms raised” in the book. He pointed out that their book had been sent accompanied by endorsements from “noted chemical evolution scholars,” organic chemist  Gordon Shaw at the University of Bradford in England, as well as  Dean Kenyon. The reviewer had dismissed the manuscript as “a complete misrepresentation,” lacking originality or comprehension. Yet Kenyon had called it “one of the best critical analyses of origin-of-life I have read to date.” Thaxton asked why Halpern had not wondered at the stark discrepancy of views: “[C]onsider the implication of the allegations of your reader. To accept his word that we have submitted a shallow, often answered critique, is to charge the readers we cited in our Prospectus with having their critical faculties so numbed they could not detect superficial criticisms. And these are noted scholars.”

Writing to Halpern at Cornell, Thaxton included an independent analysis from the editor at the MIT Press who had been “enthusiastic” about the book, only to lose his job because the publisher cut its division devoted to the life sciences. The editor,  Grahame J. C. Smith, had particularly praised Walter Bradley’s coverage of thermodynamic issues. These chapters were “so good that the rest of the book might be geared to cohesiveness with that part of the book.”20 He particularly liked Chapter 8, which he called “really excellent” and “Wonderful!” He had many helpful editorial suggestions and criticisms.

Thaxton had asked Halpern at Cornell to reconsider, but Halpern, in a final reply on December 23, 1982, courteously refused. With his masked “distinguished scholar in the field of chemical evolution” harshly opposed, he would have needed to seek additional support from Cornell scientists, and he did not want to take that course.

In the end, Buell and Thaxton went with an old and distinguished New York publisher, Philosophical Library, which while not a university or strictly scientific press could boast an impressive list of authors, prominent scientists and others. They have published a collection by Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years (1950), and their backlist features books by Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, even Charles Darwin, including a range of Nobel Prize winners.21 They also allowed the  Foundation for Thought and Ethics to market the book. Far from a religious publisher, Philosophical Library was an appropriate choice for a scientific audience. A second edition of the book was published by Lewis and Stanley, in Dallas. The move was made, says Thaxton, simply because “we can do everything much faster, without having to have big turnarounds, and waits, and so on.”

The book came trailing endorsements besides Kenyon’s. The back-cover highlights praise from astronomer  Robert Jastrow of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (“a very well thought-out and clearly written analysis”) and from one of the best-known scholars on the origin of life, chemist Robert Shapiro at New York University (“an important contribution,” “brings together the major scientific arguments that demonstrate the inadequacy of current theories,” although “I do not share the final philosophical conclusion”). Shapiro published his own book on the topic two years later,  Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth (1986).

The subsequent reception by scientists helps to explain the spark that The Mystery of Life’s Origin provided for a nascent  intelligent design movement. The reception did not come immediately. In fact, the anxious authors were initially troubled by the lack of a response. “It was dead silence,” says Thaxton. “Nobody said anything. And I was so dejected, and disappointed. It was like you drop it out there and — not a ripple. Nothing. No effect at all.” The publisher was reassuring. “‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘it takes a year’” for a book like this to get its due.

So they waited. And while they did, we can pause briefly to remember how, for skeptics of evolution, whether chemical or biological, it was a different world from ours. In 1984, the full array of resources deployed today to intimidate dissenters didn’t exist. There were no evolution professors speculating on their blogs about pre-publication books and poisoning the well against new ideas. Nor were there any pseudonymous Darwinist reviewers on Amazon posting enflamed reviews of books they hadn’t purchased much less read. Everyone wrote under his own name, and named editors served in the role of gatekeeper, thus taking responsibility. It was a fine thing to be alive before the Internet. Interest had to build organically, more honestly, via typescripts and printed matter transiting through the U.S. mail. As a side benefit, there was no Wikipedia with its unknown yet wildly influential editors, many bearing fantastical pseudonyms instead of real names, disseminating misinformation about any controversial subject and on call 24/7, at a moment’s notice, to undo an earnest effort to correct misstatements. As of 2017,  Walter Bradley himself was among those ID scientists to have their Wikipedia entry disemboweled or erased by Wiki editors. Even Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has called the encyclopedia’s treatment of intelligent design “appallingly biased.”22 This is how opinions on profound subjects are developed and spread now.

Is what I have just recounted an irrelevant aside? No, it’s not. I bring it up because, despite the aggravating interaction with Cornell University Press, the response from expert scientists to The Mystery of Life’s Origin is impressive for how relatively relaxed, if not necessarily open-minded, the scientific establishment was. And in fact, the publisher’s estimate of a year was about right. “So that was what happened,” says Thaxton. “When the reviewers started, wow, it was like they all started coming at once.”

Among the most significant voices to be raised was that of biochemist  Sidney W. Fox at the University of Miami, a leading origin-of-life researcher. Thaxton calls him a “propagandist” for the naturalistic interpretation of  abiogenesis. His June 1985 review in The Quarterly Review of Biology was loaded with ridicule, sniffing that of the writers, “Not one is listed in American Men and Women of Science, 14th edition.”23 Yet there is also a hint of grudging respect: “the authors of The Mystery present antievolutionary arguments with force.”

Fox, as Thaxton recalls, was “more significant than  Stanley Miller [of Miller-Urey fame] was, in the early days, in promoting all the origin-of-life materials in the high school textbooks and so on. In the late Fifties, early Sixties, it was all  Sidney Fox. Everywhere. All the time.” So despite the dyspeptic tenor of the review, it was an honor to get one from Fox at all. And despite the shot at their lack of status in the establishment pecking order, Thaxton notes the irony that they had a somewhat intimate connection: He inherited Fox’s old office at Iowa State from when Fox was a postdoctoral student there. “In fact,” Thaxton remembers, “I had to clean out a lot of stuff that it turns out was his.”

The August 1985 Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine was another story. Professor  James F. Jekel, in the Yale School of Medicine, was warmly congratulative. “To all who share the comfortable assumption that the scientific problems of abiogenesis are mostly resolved, this book will come as a real surprise,” he wrote. He concluded: “The volume as a whole is devastating to a relaxed acceptance of current theories of abio-genesis. It is well written, and, though technical, much of the book is within the reach of the informed non-scientist.” It is “strongly recommended to anyone interested in the problem of chemical and biological origins.”24An eminent scientist at Yale, biophysicist  Harold J. Morowitz, had a fascinating mixed response. Morowitz testified in the 1981  McLean v. Arkansas “creation science” trial and was no friend of what would be come to be called intelligent design, writing in 2005 in the Chronicle of Higher Education that “Only creationists support the theory of intelligent design.”25 According to his New York Times obituary in 2016, “He was best known for applying thermodynamic theory to biology, exploring how “the energy that flows through a system acts to organize that system.”26 So he was in a strong position to evaluate the section of The Mystery of Life’s Origin, authored by Walter Bradley, that dealt with that subject. Some years after Mystery was published, through a lucky personal connection, Charles Thaxton was able to get his book in front of the eminent Dr. Morowitz. “I contacted Morowitz about reading it,” says Thaxton. “I thought, well, gee whiz here’s a way to find out what he thinks about what Bradley has done. But I didn’t tell him that that’s what I was interested in.”

Morowitz wrote a two-page private review.27 He dismissed the Epilogue as “philosophically naïve,” and “philosophically unfair,” noting that it contains no mention of Bishop Berkeley or Benedict Spinoza. As to the science behind the book, however, he wrote, it is a “very substantial effort,” a “scientifically useful critique of a very sizable literature,” and “the authors have certainly succeeded in showing that we are very far from a convincing experimentally verifiable understanding of how something as complex as the simplest contemporary cells could have arisen.” Yet the “assumption that the problem lies beyond present-day natural science seems premature.”

There was one thing missing from the review, and it was odd given Morowitz’s own expertise. Thaxton sought an opportunity to ask him about it by phone. Thaxton said, “I’m very curious. You said some positive things about our book. But you were the expert on thermodynamics at the Arkansas trial, and yet you had not one thing to say about our treatment of thermodynamics in The Mystery of Life’s Origin. Can you tell me why?” As Thaxton remembers, over the telephone line, “There was a long, long pause. I mean, very disturbingly so. Long pause. And I said, ‘Are you still there?’ And he said, ‘Yes. I’m just thinking.’ And I said, ‘Well, can you answer?’ And he said, ‘Well, I didn’t see anything wrong with it, so I didn’t say anything about it.’” Morowitz is still today held up as a champion against “misuses of the second law of thermodynamics,” as the Darwin-lobbying  National Center for Science Education puts it.28 Yet Thaxton draws the evident conclusion from Morowitz’s response: “That means he agreed with what Bradley said. Right?” It seems so. (...)

THE MYSTERY OF LIFE’S ORIGIN

THE CONTINUING CONTROVERSY

CHARLES B. THAXTON, WALTER L. BRADLEY, ROGER L. OLSEN, JAMES TOUR,

STEPHEN MEYER, JONATHAN WELLS, GUILLERMO GONZALEZ, BRIAN MILLER, DAVID KLINGHOFFER