by Stephen Soukup
Good intentions divorced from reality often worsen problems while masquerading as noble acts.
Twenty-seven years ago, a charitable organization called the Feminist Majority Foundation discovered the plight of girls and women in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and decided that it just had to do something to help. Fortunately for the foundation, one of its board members and most active participants happened to be Mavis Leno, the wife of comedian and then-“Late Show” host Jay Leno. Mavis was connected, to put it mildly, and when she set out to “raise awareness” about the issue, she raised the awareness of all the best people.
According to The Washington Post, Mrs. Leno did what any good Hollywood humanitarian would do when faced with a tragedy of such stupendous, Holocaust-like magnitude. She took “the proceeds from Jay’s pay-per-view wrestling match with Hulk Hogan,” called up feminist icon Eleanor Smeal at the Feminist Majority, and set about planning the biggest party you’ve ever seen.
Along with Hollywood director and producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, Leno arranged a huge media event at the Director’s Guild for the evening of March 30, 1999. According to the Post, the “official coming out of the Afghan women’s cause,” was a “must-attend happening, gathering perhaps the largest number of celebrities for a single cause since the “We Are The World” campaign 14 years ago.”
Anyone who was anyone in Hollywood showed up to pledge their support for the oppressed Afghan women and to protest the truly barbarous behavior of the Taliban. The guest list included Vince Gill; Marlo Thomas; Winona, Ashley, and Naomi Judd; Lionel Richie (who, of course, donated a song to the effort); Paula Abdul, Christine Lahti, Alfre Woodard, Gillian Anderson, Candace Bergen, Mary Tyler Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, Rene Zellweger, and Lily Tomlin, to name just a few.
The members of Feminist Majority basked in their successful effort to demonstrate how much they cared for their oppressed sisters half a world away. “For a human rights situation,” Mrs. Leno said, “this is unusually simple. The Taliban are spectacularly villainous.” After all, agreed Feminist Majority board member Kathy Spillar, “there is no ‘other side’ to this issue.”
Unfortunately for these dedicated feminists—and especially for those they purported to help—there was another side to the issue, and they didn’t actually do anyone any good. Indeed, according to those who knew what was really going on in Afghanistan at the time, they probably made things worse for its women and girls. After all, it’s not as if the Taliban was going to be cowed by a bunch of Hollywood dreamers. If anything, the Islamist misogynists were likely encouraged in their efforts, convinced that they were doing what was right.
When confronted by the reality of the situation and the likely real impact of the Feminist Majority’s efforts, Mavis Leno’s husband and white knight defended her and her motives: “They’re shining a light on the problem,” Jay Leno told the Post. “If this all turns out to be wrong, if it’s a huge mistake—and there seems to be an awful lot of proof in the other direction—nobody did anything for the wrong reasons.”
I was reminded of Mavis Leno’s not-so-great crusade the other day by a comment made on Twitter/X by the “award-winning historian, biographer and broadcaster” Tom Holland. Holland, who is not Spiderman but is a well-known BBC personality, was reacting to the re-emergence of the decades-long “grooming” (i.e. “gang rape”) scandal in Great Britain and to the evidence that public authorities—including current Prime Minister Keir Starmer—did everything in their power for years to ensure that justice was never served and that the victims were victimized over and over (and over) again. “The true nightmare of Rotherham,” Holland tweeted, “is that the motives of those who turned a blind eye, however monstrous the consequences, were indeed noble.”
Although it is somewhat comforting that Holland was pilloried for his statement, the sentiment he expressed is both pervasive and telling. Like Jay and Mavis Leno, Holland insisted that the act of offering help was all that mattered, no matter the consequences of that “help.” The motives and intentions of the would-be helper are paramount and morally inoculating, even if they cause massive, unintended damage.
The term usually applied to such “nobly” motivated but disastrous actions these days is “suicidal empathy,” a concept popularized by the Canadian intellectual and author Gad Saad. Historically, such delusions would have been identified as characteristic of the “Gnostic” temptation.
As conservatives have long known (and as I have noted before in these pages), among the greatest insights into modern-day leftism were those offered by the German-American political philosopher Eric Voegelin. Among other things, Voegelin postulated that the modern left is “Gnostic” in its temperament and worldview, which is to say that it perverts the Christian salvation narrative, believing that it alone understands the moral principles and acts that will save man from his temporal fate. In almost every detail, the Lenos, the Feminist Majority, Tom Holland, and those whom he defends have all approached the world and its ills from a Gnostic/dream world perspective. The denial of reality; the substitution of Gnostic fantasy for reality; the expectation that reality would conform to the Gnostic formulation; the proposal of actions that would, in the real world, be considered morally insane; the abuse and inversion of vocabulary; and the angry reaction to the impositions of reality by lashing out scapegoats; etc. are all part of these two stories. They are all a part of the Voegelian description of the Gnostic dream world as well:
In the Gnostic dream world…nonrecognition of reality is the first principle. As a consequence, types of action which in the real world would be considered as morally insane because of the real effects which they have will be considered moral in the dream world because they intended an entirely different effect. The gap between intended and real effect will be imputed not to the Gnostic immorality of ignoring the structure of reality but to the immorality of some other person or society that does not behave as it should behave according to the dream conception of cause and effect. The interpretation of moral insanity as morality, and of the virtues of sophia and prudentia as immorality, is a confusion difficult to unravel. And the task is not facilitated by the readiness of the dreamers to stigmatize the attempt at critical clarification as an immoral enterprise . . . .
It doesn’t matter what one does, in short. All that matters is what one intends. If one intended to do good and to make things better, then the actual, real-world consequences of his actions are beside the point. He still acted “nobly.”
Unfortunately, as Voegelin continued, all of this results in the perpetuation of monstrous behavior—in Afghanistan, in Rotherham, and throughout the modern world. “Gnostic politics,” he wrote, is “self-defeating.” Instead of solving problems, it perpetuates them; it exacerbates them. Its “disregard for the structure of reality leads to continuous warfare.”
As the calls for justice in the grooming/rape scandal in Great Britain grow louder, it is important to remember that Tom Holland is dead wrong. The officials who enabled this heinous tragedy for decades did not act nobly. They acted monstrously in their own right, denying the structure of reality in order to soothe their consciences and accumulate political power. They should be punished accordingly.
Stephen Soukup
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/01/04/afghan-girls-british-girls-and-the-nonrecognition-of-reality/
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