The proper pop-culture reference here is not The Handmaid’s Tale or 1984 but The Shawshank Redemption: Americans got a look at what life would be like not in Gilead or Oceania but under Samuel Norton, the corrupt, sadistic, Bible-toting warden, a Pharisaical hypocrite whose scripture needlepoint hid his wall safe.
Nichols' reference is to what most normal Americans fear about the religious right's threat to impose its will in the political sphere, and I think that the Shawshank prison is an apt analogue. But Shawshank is apt in a bigger way for its mythopoesis. On one level it's about how the prison keepers like Norton are just as much prisoners as those behind bars. The main difference is that the prison keepers don't know it and have no desire to escape. They think they're in control, but are completely oblivious of how they themselves are captured by a system that oppresses them perhaps even more than it oppresses their prisoners.
Norton is a perfect metaphor for the traditionalist whose identity is deeply embedded in the empty forms of traditional morality that been invaded and occupied by evil forces that could not be more alien from a true morality. His situation is worse than his prisoners because he feels no need of liberation or the desire to seek for it. He's not locked in as his prisoners are, but he chooses to stay anyway.
But more importantly Shawshank is a story about what true liberation means. I've spent a chunk of time in the last several months talking about how the justice project on the Cultural Left is captured by a post-Marxist Freudianism exemplified by Deleuze and Guattari (D&G) and theorized in their book Anti-Oedipus. (See here here, and here.) I've written about how I think that's a dead-end because it's fundamentally a negative project with nothing inspiring in it to which people can say Yes. One leaves the prison behind for, you know, 'whatever', as in whatever makes you happy, which cannot get beyond the appetitive in a milieu on the Cultural Left in which the transcendent cannot enter into consideration. "Desire" is the big thing for D&G. Desire for what? It doesn't matter.
Liberation in that milieu means mostly to be transgressive of old taboos without getting punished for it. And so Trump is the apotheosis of D&G liberation project, whether they intended it or not. If they argue he's breaking the wrong taboos, who's to say they're wrong? By what standard? But the bottom line here is that whether we're talking about Trump or D&G, the moral frame is too often a movement from Kohlberg's Stage 1 to Stage 2, from the eight-year-old who dutifully follows the rules, to the ten-year-old who realizes the rules are arbitrary and there is nothing fundamentally "good" about them. He realizes he can break the rules if he's clever enough to get away with it. [See Note 1]
Our politics, but more importantly our consensus about moral norms, whether on the Right or Left, doesn't really operate beyond stage 2. Traditionalists on the Right differ from Cosmopolitans on the Cultural Left only in that Traditionalists believe that transgressors ought to be punished for traditionally deviant behavior while Cosmopolitans don't. And the Cosmopolitans of course trade in the old traditionalist taboos for trendy, new, PC ones. Traditionalists allow Trump his transgressive behavior because what really matters is his even more flagrant transgression of PC taboos. He may not be an exemplar of their traditionalist norms, but his flouting of PC taboos with impunity is more important because in doing so he gives them permission to flout them with impunity as well.
All the energy in the D&G liberation project derives from the thrill of moving beyond the old taboos, not in where one arrives once he is freed from them. Nevertheless, D&G are half right: we are acculturated into Oedipal social-psychological constructs that imprison us to the degree that we allow them to unconsciously program us both individually and as a society. We are all prisoners of our acculturation, and we do need to be liberated from it.
So I agree with D&G that our acculturation into oppressive "Oedipal" cultural structures is provisional and is indeed, like Shawshank Prison, a largely an arbitrary social construction designed to reinforce certain power arrangements. But I differ from them in insisting that the provisionality of our social constructions lies in that they are always under challenge by ontonormative transcendentals like Justice and Truth. This is at the heart of Socrates' subversive project but also at the heart of the gospels. The Socratic and Christian projects are both in very similar ways "anti-Oedipal". Christianity when it is truest to itself is always subversive of oppressive social constructs. But neither project is subversive for the sake of subversion, but subversive in the service of the ontonormative, i.e., of a deeper, more truly liberating, transcendental norm.
The Shawshank prison as a social system has no relationship to the ontonormative, but what makes Andy, the Tim Robbins character, different from every other prisoner is not that he's just motivated to get out of an evil, cruel, oppressively destructive system to resume a normal life, but that he is like the man in Plato's cave that walks out into the sunlight where he can experience not just getting out but getting into the Living Real. That's what the beach in Mexico symbolizes, a state of awareness that is truly liberating because more deeply in touch with the Living Real. Leaving prison was not just about getting out, but about getting into something that was more ontonormatively "real".
From my pov, D&G describe a situation that is very much like out of the pan into the fire, from one destructive set of circumstances into another. It's the situation of Red, the Morgan Freeman character, once he's released on parole. He's free, but Is his life significantly better in the world outside? There was at least a kind of comfort and security in the old prison life, but now he's wandering in the wilderness with all the stress and insecurity that come with that. But there's wandering that's purposeful and hopeful, and there's wandering that's just being lost. And Red seems pretty lost there for a while, until there's an intervention, his finding the gift buried in the field left for him by Andy. (See Note 2).
Finding it is his awakening moment, the moment when something truly new and liberating becomes a possibility. He left Egypt when he got out of prison and went out into the wilderness, but now that he's found the treasure buried in the field, he can move to the promised land, a land he never took seriously as as a possibility for himself. Good thing that he had a friend who did.
Getting out of the old, constraining, oppressive structure is important, but where you go after is more important.
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Note 1: I'm pasting in this summary of Kohlberg's Six Stages from Genealogy Part 4B. Although Kohlberg is a social scientist who eschews any talk about transcendentals and insists his work is just descriptive or phenomenological, it's not hard to extrapolate from his 'description' what I've been calling the 'ontonormative'.
Pre-conventional: Kierkegaard's Aesthetic
1. Follow the Rules for fear of Punishment. Example: Teacher's pet in elementary school who tattles on those breaking the rules. Rules are arbitrary and have no legitimacy except as how those with power define a regime of rewards and punishments. Example of arrested Level 1 development: the slave in any master-slave relationship. I follow the rules not because they are in any way true or right but because the Master demands it, [and I will be punished if I disobey and am caught].
2. What can I get away with? I'll do what's expected of me to avoid punishment, but will do what I want if I'm clever enough to get away with it. Since the rules have no legitimacy outside of an arbitrary rewards and punishments regime, there is nothing wrong with doing what you want so long as you can avoid punishment. This is a perfectly healthy way kids test boundaries in middle school that is necessary for developing sense of autonomy. Example of arrested Level 2 development: Donald Trump. Rules are for other people. I make my own, and I don't care who gets hurt.
Conventional: Kierkegaard's Ethical
3. Rules matter because they define what is "right", but personal loyalties matter more. I'll break the rules if it benefits those I love even if it means I'll get in trouble if caught. Example: It's wrong to lie, but I'll tell a lie to protect a friend who will get in trouble. Extreme example: The mother with a sick child who will break every protocol--steal, scream, maim, or stomp over anyone who gets in the way of her mission--to make sure her sick child gets the best care in a hospital.
4. Personal relationships matter, but the common good matters more. You can't just break the rules with impunity because it benefits your family and friends. Example: Socrates submits to his execution despite being offered escape by rich friends. He rejects escape because he does not want to undermine the rule of law in Athens, even though he has been unjustly condemned by it. His personal well being and the pain of his loss for his friends is not as important as the larger common good.
Post-Conventional: Kierkegaard's Religious
5. Some rules are just wrong, and I have to do whatever I can including breaking them at the risk of my own well being and the well being of my family to reform them. Example: Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Gandhi. [The common good is served by breaking these laws, which are fundamentally unjust by an informative standard.]
6. The rules might be just and reflect the ontonormative ideal 99% of the time, but some circumstances require that I break them and suffer the consequences. K's teleological suspension of the ethical. Example: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor executed for his involvement in the failed plot to assassinate Hitler. Murder is [ontonormatively] wrong, but in this instance the rule must be suspended for the greater good.
How one's moral thinking and actions develop from one stage to the next depends on a lot of factors, including challenges posed in particular existential situations. Not everybody is confronted with the choice whether to get involved in a plot to assassinate a genocidal madman. But that's the point. The rules at one level don't determine thinking or behavior in situations where they don't apply, and the morally mature person understands the difference.
And it's usually a personal crisis of some sort that forces a choice that will move someone from one level to the next. Socrates is not the moral inferior of Bonhoeffer; it's just that the choices that they were confronted with were different and so required a different order of thinking. And it could be argued that Socrates was condemned for the same reason that MLK was shot and Bonhoeffer hung because each in their different way was perceived as destabilizing the existing social order. So really Socrates' moral mission was enacted on Level 5/6, even if his choice to submit to his execution was made on Level 4.
I should also point out that most of our public moral thinking in politics and business operates on the level of utility, which never goes beyond Levels 1 and 2. The highest level of moral development that you'll see dramatized on TV is Level 3, which is when family and friend loyalty trumps everything else. But most of our popular culture in TV and films operates only on Levels 1 and 2 where Level 2 people think of themselves as uebermenschen and everyone else as Last Men.
I'm sure that's how Trump thinks of himself, as a superman who lives in a realm beyond good and evil because the norms that define good and evil are b.s and have no foundation in the Good, which he has no sense of. He, and other masters of the universe like him in the political and business spheres, confuse the Pre-Conventional with the Post-Conventional.
I think the latter is what Nietzsche really means in his talk about beyond good and evil. Nietzsche was a Post-Conventional moralist who has been appropriated by people to justify their Pre-Conventional behavior. And most of the rest of us can't tell the difference because we have no vertical dimension--no wisdom--that provides criteria with which to evaluate non-conventional thinking and behavior.
Note 2: "Now Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found, and hid. In his joy, he goes and sells all that he has, and buys that field." — Matthew 13:44.
The Kingdom of Heaven is a metaphor for the ontonormative regime that lies buried until found in every human heart. The Socratic project was to dig into the hearts of his interlocutors to see if he might unearth it. To have unearthed it is liberation from the constraints of custom and taboo in cases where custom is oppressive or unjust, but can also be restorative of the vitality of customs that were ontonormative in their origins.
See also "Fantasy and Escape: Thoughts on Tolkien's Quest Saga".