Far from a mere sordid distraction or an endless supply of tabloid slop, the Epstein files may just be the most important revelation we’ve witnessed in a century or more. The contents tell us much about who we are, what we value, and where, if we’re not careful, we might end up.
More precisely, the files expose three colossal failures, each of which is a cautionary tale worth contemplating at length.
First, and most obviously, let us condemn Washington. In succumbing to petty political pressures and agreeing to release the files, the federal government cracked its knuckles and tossed two centuries of intricate legislation concerning our right to privacy into the dustbin.
Imagine, for example, being Melinda Gates and sipping your morning coffee knowing that, though you’ve committed no transgression, the entire world is now informed that your ex-husband had a plot to clandestinely feed you medication to treat sexually transmitted diseases he’d caught by cavorting with Russian mistresses.
In 1890, Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren warned us about the grave damage done by precisely such blatant disregard for our right to be left alone. “To satisfy a prurient taste the details of sexual relations are spread broadcast in the columns of the daily papers,” they wrote.
To occupy the indolent, column upon column is filled with idle gossip, which can only be procured by intrusion upon the domestic circle. The intensity and complexity of life, attendant upon advancing civilization, have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, and man, under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual; but modern enterprise and invention have, through invasions upon his privacy, subjected him to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury.
Rather than act as a wise guardian of its citizens and their inimitable interests, our government sided with the pornographers and semi-pornographers known as journalists, supplying them with smut and encouraging them to peddle it. Which would’ve been bad enough, had Washington not committed another, far graver sin: In releasing the files, the government admitted, however tacitly, that it is no longer really interested in the rule of law.
Once upon a time not so long ago, before Russiagate and other egregious examples of weaponized law enforcement agencies mobilized to score partisan points, it was assumed that Americans could kinda, sorta trust at least some of the arms of the federal government to conduct investigations fairly, efficiently, and discreetly, if not always, then at least some of the time. A responsible administration would’ve seized this opportunity to make the rule of law great again; this administration chose to dispense with the formalities of trained professionals sifting through relevant data in search of actionable items and let the public be judge, jury, and executioner instead. Yes, shame on Jeffrey Epstein, but also shame on those in office who decided to release his emails for all to see.
The files were searched in a feeding frenzy to find dirt with which to smear enemies. As we recognized that our government had invited us into a Hobbesian state of war of all against all, it was difficult not to think of that seminal exchange in A Man for All Seasons, in which the lawyer William Roper squares off against the great Sir Thomas More. “So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!” thunders Roper, to which Sir Thomas replies, “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?” Sounding a lot like those benighted bobos mouthing off on social media, Roper barely hesitates before answering. He bellows, “I’d cut down every law in England to do that!” But Sir Thomas has the last word: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast—man’s laws, not God’s—and if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it—d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”
In its haste to fight devils, real or imagined, the federal government cut down our privacy protections just when we needed them most.
But if the release of the Epstein files alerted us to a systemic failure of government, the contents gave us a gruesome peek into the moral frailty of our self-appointed intellectual and moral betters. Sifting through the muck, one was left not so much with evidence of actual crimes as with a portrait of the rich and powerful as strangely—or, better, pathetically—soulless creeps. Take, for example, the deep thinker Deepak Chopra, who has been rewarded for his alleged profundity with teaching gigs at Northwestern, Columbia, and Harvard, as well as with millions of dollars in book sales. What does every billionaire’s favorite enlightened guru sound like when not pontificating for $25,000 per speech? The Epstein files gave us a disquieting answer. “God,” thus spoke Chopra, “is a construct[.] Cute girls are real.” Which may explain why, on another occasion, Chopra invited the disgraced sex offender on a trip, instructing him to“bring your girls.”
Chopra broke no law. Being an empty-minded sleazeball is not illegal. But reading the sordid and sophomoric exchange, you can’t help but wonder what went so truly, deeply, and profoundly wrong in his life that, in his seventies and enjoying every opportunity our opulent society has to offer, Chopra would still sound and act like a silly, oversexed adolescent chasing fleeting, fleshy thrills. And he’s hardly alone! Reading the files, we note again and again that maturity, that unremitting teacher, seems to have neglected our most powerful men, leaving them with too many resources and too few real and sustainable attachments to family, faith, and community.
Which means that the Epstein files expose the great tragedy of our time. The Greeks, W. H. Auden observed, delivered the tragedy of necessity, which focused on what had to be. Christianity, on the other hand, gave us the endlessly more heartbreaking tragedy of possibility. Watching it unfurl, Auden noted, the viewer thinks, “What a pity it was this way when it might have been otherwise.” To read the Epstein files is to ask what might have happened had the thinkers and the builders, the rich and the mighty, the men with every possibility at their fingertips decided to submit to one or another higher calling, or even take refuge in ordinary decency, rather than succumb to their basest appetites.
And yet, it gets worse. If there is one thing more dispiriting than the misdeeds of the powerful, it has been the moral panic that has seized so many as they take to demanding consequences before they can even point out any real crimes.
“See,” squawked American pundits on the left and the right alike after the arrest, in England, of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the bumbler formerly known as prince, “at least the British are doing something to punish the guilty.” That the ex-royal was allegedly guilty of very specific and very serious crimes hardly seemed to matter to the mob. The hysterics are now demanding the scalp of anyone remotely entangled with Epstein, context and capacity be damned.
Burke regretted the way in which the revolutionary spirit rends “the decent drapery of life.” The same holds for moral panics. Certainly, crimes deserve punishment and moral transgressions merit censure. But it is a sure sign of a society in the throes of vertigo when it is unable to distinguish the illegal from the malodorous, and when it treats mere association as indicative of complicity. Because nature abhors a vacuum, moral panics of the sort we’re experiencing often find a way of cementing themselves into social mores, at least for a while, making scores of innocents suffer and delivering cruelty where older and wiser faith traditions urge discretion and offer forgiveness. We need to recover the biblical prohibition, delivered in Leviticus, against lashon hara (evil tongue), which forbids unnecessary revelations of embarrassing and harmful things about others, even if they are true.
Here’s hoping, then, that we treat the Epstein files as a wake-up call. Our task is to raise better and more virtuous generations, educating them not only to join the ranks of the gilded meritocracy but also—and primarily—to focus on the good rather than gilded privileges. Decades of glamorizing base pursuits gave us Jeffrey Epstein. We have no more urgent task than making sure that the men and women who come into power tomorrow and the day after are cut from purer cloth.
Image by Geoff Livingston, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
