Bobo’s Moral Relativism
Let’s play “one of these things is not like the others” with Mr. David Brooks:
First came the atrocity, then came the vanity. The atrocity is what Jerry Sandusky has been accused of doing at Penn State. The vanity is the outraged reaction of a zillion commentators over the past week, whose indignation is based on the assumption that if they had been in Joe Paterno’s shoes, or assistant coach Mike McQueary’s shoes, they would have behaved better. They would have taken action and stopped any sexual assaults.
Unfortunately, none of us can safely make that assumption. Over the course of history — during the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide or the street beatings that happen in American neighborhoods — the same pattern has emerged. Many people do not intervene. Very often they see but they don’t see.
I assume most of you have immediately spotted the problem.
Look, in some contexts I understand the disdain for people who (as Pauline Kael put it in her fantastic critique of Stanley Kramer) “are brutally sure how other people should have acted.” When it comes to people who are sure that they would have stood up to the Nazis or thugs with machetes or school shooters or whatever then I agree that they’re just blowhards. But Penn State was nothing like those cases. It wasn’t a question of standing up to power; Paterno, Spanier, and Curley were the power. They didn’t face physical retribution or even (if they had acted in a timely manner) substantial career retribution for doing the right thing. To compare this to people who didn’t join the French Resistance is absurd.
And, yes, we’re none of us perfect, and who knows — I hope not, but maybe if I lived in the kind of bubble Paterno did I would also have looked the other way. But if I did so when people harshly criticized me for it they would be 100% right, not “vain.” Modesty about how we would respond to moral dilemmas doesn’t mean that we have to abandon our capacity to make moral judgments. The most powerful people at Penn State allowing a known sex predator to keep attacking children is an easy case.
Even allowing for the lack of power here…a child rapist was not about to suddenly man up and start a fight with an adult. He’d have run like the devil and probably never shown his face on campus again
Not just an adult – McQueary had been playing elite-level college football a couple of years earlier. I’m pretty sure McQueary could handle Sandusky in a
dark alley locker-room shower.Whoops, failed to close a del tag.
Whoops, failed to close a del tag.
I blame the moral degeneracy of the 1960s for your error. Cotton Mather never left tags unclosed, did he, libtards?
Hippies were notorious for the wide open tags. Also bellbottoms.
McQueary claims he stopped the rape and went to the police. Link to SI article about a leaked email.
The police I have experience with seem to keep pretty good records. His claim should be easy enough to corroborate. If he’s telling the truth, it raises more interesting questions about how (or how not) the rape was investigated in 2002.
Yeah, I was sympathetic to the guy until that email.
If it were true, the county DA would have a lot of ‘splainin to do to the grand jury. One suspects therefore that the fellow testified under oath truthfully, then exaggerated to his friends in email.
But of course it could be thenother way around, in which case we find out how PA penalizes perjury. Whee!
Yeah, but manly-man Bobo’d ‘Billy Jack’ anybody’s ass in the newsroom if they split an infinitive!
Yeah, nice strawman.
Brooks does not say or imply that “we have to abandon our capacity to make moral judgments”. He’s simply saying that you’re probably fooling yourself if you think that YOU are good and moral and noble enough to have acted differently.
Oh, and he gives much more appropriate examples than the ones you excerpted.
But hey, chest-thumping self-righteousness is so much fun! I can see why you’re upset at Brooks for raining on your parade.
If you want to make a more apt comparison, look up the Kitty Genovese case in NYC in the early 60s (I think it was 62).
There’s an instance where a woman was raped and murdered over the course of several minutes and a few city residential blocks and no one even bothered to call the cops.
Bobo’s analogies lack….credibility.
The Kitty Genovese case didn’t really happen like that, if wiki is to be believed.
Supposedly, at least some people claim they called the cops and one person intervened, but the geography was such that almost no one or no one could really see what was happening.
The Kitty Genovese case didn’t really happen like that, if wiki is to be believed.
The last time that argument was made, it did not go well.
People want to cover up Kitty Genovese murder WHY?
I am impressed. Is there any snark on the internet you don’t have bookmarked?
Wow…I didn’t even remember that piece of snark. And I wrote it.
Thanks for the memories, Substance!
Perhaps some anonymous snark benefactor, when they’ve got some really good snark, leaves it in comment threads under your name?
Which ones? Brooks has lots of analogies, ranging from epic misery like the Holocaust, to a more mundane failure to challenge sexist remarks in the workplace.
I wonder if you read the column, instead of just the excerpts Scott provides?
Brooks has lots of analogies
Including, as it turns out, Kitty Genovese.
Given that Bobo Godwinned himself, do we really care what the other 650 words of his column said?
I dunno, ask Scott. He’s the one who posted it.
given that Godwinning refers to the odds that an online discussion will eventually have Hitler/Nazis introduced goes to one as the discussion grows, how exactly did Brooks NYT article do this?
OT, but that Hitler guy, what a bastard!
What did I lose?
I wasn’t aware of that Internet tradition!
Just kidding. I am in fact aware of all Internet traditions.
In order to prove his point, he compared the Penn State crimes and cover-up to the Holocaust. According to some interpretations of Godwin’s Law, by doing so he automatically made himself into a clown and lost the argument.
Per Mal’s Wikipedia link:
Get a load of the Godwin Nazi.
Who elected Godwin King? I demand a recount. Stalin never had to put up with this shit!
or is European history from 1932 to 1945 verboten? Did I Godwin the thread by using the word verboten?
Now I’m imagining a sort of meta-Godwin’s Law:
And in not one do we have a person with complete power over the situation like there was at Penn State.
That’s why this part is important.
If we’re going to talk about Mike McQueary, maybe. But Joe Paterno absolutely would ahve had the power to put a stop to this and chose, we don’t know why, not to use it.
Whatever. Brooks obviously did not read Scalzi before writing his screed. Outrage is not the same thing as vanity.
Nor has he bothered to read Substance’s incomparable snark archives.
Snarchives?
Snarchives with Godwin sauce on a cracker such as Glen Beck or Rick Perry.
+1
Oh now that is lovely.
Or for that matter the witty, well-reasoned, insightful post that I wrote about the entire situation, which I can’t seem to locate because I was drunk at the time that I wrote it.
Yeah how dare you use Brook’s own words against him! All he is saying is that since you don’t know how you would act you can’t blame Paterno!
Brooks follows a well-established pattern here: he starts off making some observations that are defensible, e.g., that we can’t necessarily be sure about how we’d respond to a dangerous/shocking/unjust situation, but then of course pulls a classic culture war move:
So once again, it’s the DFH’s fault. If we could go back to that time when we all knew our places and kept them, apparently, we’d know exactly how to respond to the crimes at Penn State. Right.
These systems emphasized our sinfulness. They reminded people of the evil within themselves. Life was seen as an inner struggle against the selfish forces inside. These vocabularies made people aware of how their weaknesses manifested themselves and how to exercise discipline over them. These systems gave people categories with which to process savagery and scripts to follow when they confronted it.
Which is why this never happened. That was not the sinful nature you were looking for.
So Bobo, how did “The Greatest Generation” ever give birth to all of these DFH’s?
And, of course, none of the Baby Boomer generation ever voted for Nixon in ’68 or ’72, or Ford/Reagan/Bush/Dole/Little Boots/McCain in the following elections.
No, they were all Alinsky/Rubin/Che/Mao/dSeals/Hearst Liberals.
To have kept his job this long, Brooks must have pictures of the NY Times editors in the shower ‘horsing around’ with Jerry Sandusky and little boys.
It was Dr. Spock’s fault, of course.
Fuckin’ Vulcans!
Spock’s doctorate was from a top-10 history school so he never learned much about to get a better job than adjuncting as a science officer before James Tiberius Kirk overacted his way into Spock’s heart.
Bones had to take a government job because ObamaCare 2400 did not pay him enough for private practice.
Hang on, was his department Top 10 in Western Vulcan History or Latin-Vulcan History? Because these distinctions are important.
See, now I’ve got this picture of Sarek riding an Appaloosan wearing a Stetson…
Fuckin’ Vulcans!
How do they work?
I notice Brooks’ awareness of the sinfulness weakness of humankind rarely stops Brooks from supporting his own side when it wants to start or escalate a war. One might think that awareness of sin and potential sin and weakness even in those on one’s own side might cause one to hesitate before supporting the launch and escalation of campaigns of military violence.
Apparently, Brooks is right in a way: many people are incapable of seeing sin and weakness in themselves (or their allies).
Brooks’ continual suggestions that we do not have any current vocabulary for dealing with our inner sinfulness just floors me. Floors me. Put aside the fact that these apparent systems and vocabularies of the past hardly did anything to prevent all sorts of terrible, horrible violence. Put aside the fact that my experience with actual current Christianity (which I’m told is the majority religion in America) is full to the brim with the vocabulary of one’s own inherent sinfulness (that may be too Lutheran of me: obviously political Christianity is quite fixated on the outward sinfulness of others, not the inner sinfulness of ourselves). But all the things I read on the internet from liberals, peace advocates, animal advocates, feminists, and environmentalists can hardly be said to be lacking in moral clarity about right and wrong, and are often full to the brim of awareness of one’s own sins, weaknesses, flaws, or bad tendencies, are quite able to use vocabulary to discuss one’s inner problems, and are very open in discussing how to avoid harming others.
You know whom I’m quite worried that my moral courage would fail during the street beating of?
Why worry?
Society?
Well this sure is an overtly stupid strawman.
I pretty obviously cannot know for complete certain, having never been in such a situation, how I would react to being put in a position where a longtime associate of mine was raping children.
But I pretty obviously can know for certain that, if I were to find myself in such a situation, that if I did react by covering up and protecting this child rapist for years, that I would be, you know, a fucking monster.
That word “strawman” … I do not think it means what you think it means.
Apparently there are fans of Brooks and Douthat who read lefty blogs and who are out in force this week, correcting improper interpretations and uncharitable readings (see Crooked Timber, for example) of columns having to do with the whole Sandusky/Paterno clusterfuck. One would almost think they were coordinated somehow.
While the annoying was strong in that thread, it did contain this gem:
Both the Nielsen Haydens should be on the National Register of Historic Lnadmarks, or the civil list, or the honor roll. or some damn thing.
As long as you remember that Teresa is always The Thing, I concur.
That word “strawman” … I do not think it means what you think it means.
Well, I’m sure you can cite plenty of arguments based on the premise that “I would have been better” as opposed to “what they did was horribly wrong,” then. Since I haven’t seen them, I’m sure it would be educational!
You deny they are out there? If the argument is structured, “I’m sure I would have done better, therefore it was horribly wrong,” it’s of that form. The issue is that many people do rely on a speculative assessment of what they would do to confirm or advance the argument that what was done was wrong. And as you say, that is a fallacy. We are all capable of doing wrong, and most of these people have no idea how theywould act in circumstances they have not been in. But wrong things are wrong because they are wrong, not because people think they wouldn’t do them. Very few people are willing, or rather very many blog commenter are not willing, to admit as you do that certain of the reactions of these figures (admittedly, people mostly refer to McQueary in these claims, who at this point you are conspicuously leaving unmentioned in your posts) are ones they might very well have replicated to some degree if faced with the same pressures. It’s clearly a big part of their assessment of the extent of the moral failing involved here. There’s clearly a need by many to base the argument about the moral failure here on a claim that what was done fell short of what an average pesron (for whom people insert “themselves as ideally imagined” as an analytical proxy) would in fact do in such a situation, as opposed to what we should expect an average (or any morally responsible) person to do, as you correctly say should be what we assess. The simple presence of an argument that these things were wrong does not mean that those arguments were not based at least in part on the premise that “I would have been better.” If you don’t see arguments based on that premise in blog comments if not in formally published commentary, then we are reading different blog comments. Except, the comments I’m reading are the ones under your blog posts. so I don’t think we are.
I concede the point — Some Blog Commenters Somewhere are making this argument. Who gives a shit? Brooks is implying that this is the argument most people are making, which isn’t true.
That’s fair enough. I’m certainly not claiming most people are making that argument, though I think a lot of people (not just blog commenters, but definitely many of the ones here) have in part rested their arguments for the wrongness of the various acts explicitly on an intuition about what they might have done in that situation – an intuition that happens to give themselves credit for actions in circumstances that in most cases they have never face. But I don’t claim that most of the commentary on this have done that.
I would point to a tendency of yours to credit a circle of other commenters with the rigor you yourself display in your arguments that is often undefined or untestable in such a way that it makes it hard to address the question of to what extent your arguments are actually much better than a significant group of people with whom you share a bottom line, but not a similar level of rhetorical integrity. That’s the more to your credit in a sense, I suppose, generosity being a virtue and all. But while it’s hard to say what “most” people giving their opinion on this have done in their arguments, it does obscure a (in my view) significant matter to wave aside the fact that many have displayed some nontrivial argumentative missteps by simply insisting that most have not.
If I saw a guy ass raping a child in a shower* I’m pretty sure I would try to beat the living shit out of him.
*I’m assuming he has no weapons.
I’m not so sure I would have the balls/stupidity to speak out against the Nazis though.
Were the kids any safer, were people more likely to intervene, before the dirty fucking hippies took over? I know no evidence of it, Brooks doesn’t provide any, and it goes against what I know anecdotally.
For what it’s worth, I am not particularly heroic, but I have taken greater risks than McQueary would have had to to put a stop to cruelty I have witnessed, and so have several other people I know. Maybe Brooks should spend more time with the common folks around the Applebee’s salad bar.
Well, at least before the DFHs took over we didn’t have to hear about it. The Catholic Church has been offering people an attempt to seek sanctuary from their problematic sexuality for an awfully long time – which do you think is more likely, that some of these people committed atrocities only in the last couple of decades, since the DFHs took over, or that we’ve only been able to find out in the last couple of decades, since the DFHs took over?
That’s been the Original Sin of all DFHs down through the ages: Thinking that Power shouldn’t be abused.
In addition, given the special status of the coach at Penn State, Paterno was the true power regardless of whoever was identified as his “superior” on paper.
david brooks, david brooks, hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, name rings a bell……………
oh, wait, i remember now! he’s that guy that used to write columns for the nyt’s, until he suffered permanent, irreversible brain damage.
So basically, all those people who make a moral judgment against Paterno are preening themselves. Also, we need to return to the days when people would make a moral judgment against Paterno.
+1
Does he contradict himself? Very well then, he contradicts himself.
winner.
Repeating this from upthread, if I may. Link to SI article about a McQueary email in which he claims he stopped the rape and went to police about it.
I hope the SI article’s story is truthful (as distinct from merely accurately reflecting McQueary’s claims). If it is, it’s beyond strange we haven’t heard this version before.
It doesn’t say which police he discussed it with.
Yeah. I think he’s referring to University Police. I’m actually more bothered by the open questions in the email version of events than the brain freeze/fuck!/run away grand jury version of events. Oh, I made sure he stopped raping the kid. What did you do with the kid? Did you tell Sandusky to stop sodomizing the kid and take him home? Did you take the kid to the hospital? To his parents? Running away would be wrong, but understandable cowardice. To claim that he confronted the situation and took no measures to comfort/protect the child until after consulting with his father is just… wtf, man?
A common argument from PSU people I saw last week (haven’t been back to Black Shoe Diaries recently) was that speaking to university vice president Gary Schultz, who in some way oversaw the campus police but was not a policeman, constituted reporting the crime to the police. Maybe that’s what McQueary is claiming?
And yes, this raises all sorts of questions, including why not tell any of this to the grand jury? I don’t see why the grand jury wouldn’t have included the details in its report, but who knows?
Stewart Copeland?
The problem for Brooks is Paterno and the AD acted in a true conservative Burekean sense and valued the tradition of the institution above any given individual.
Have you seen the NY Times piece regarding how Paterno transferred his ownership of the house to be in his wife’s name fully for $1 back in July?
Sounds to me like he knew what might be coming and got his affairs in order. I suspect the news reports out of the local paper back in March gave them all early warning.
I am in no way informed about the law, but I have an awfully hard time imagining that little charade will fool anyone – unless she kicks him out, of course.
Well, the grand jury proceedings must have been coming to an end and the prosecutors might have leaked inside information. Or he had an idea that he was screwed. Either way.
Actually my favorite bit was when he talked about who this shit never happened when America was the Puritans. Because, you know people had morals and stuff and stopped bad things from happening. Like with the Salem Witch Trials. Oh wait.
Back to Rule 1. David Brooks is always wrong.
Rule 2. David Brooks makes shit up.
Rule 3. Because he is white and male and connected every time he does this he gets promoted.
Rule 4. Because he has a platform at a serious paper he is a very serious person and therefore gets to write what he wants. And we are supposed to take seriously.
Which brings us back to Rule 1.
Well, at least according to the Puritans themselves, all sorts of depravity was going on:
Also, witchcraft.
That poor hideous, hideous man.
Not to mention Quakers.
The Holocaust? Really? I once saw my mother— an abject scaredy-cat and nervous Nelly— wade into a pack of angry wild dogs to pick up my brother and carry him home. Even wild dogs respect an adult rescuing a child. Adults risk their lives to save children every day of the week. It is natural to protect our young. It is an essential trait of our species, otherwise we would have died off long ago, because children can be some seriously demanding assholes, sometimes. There’s a reason they’re so damned cute.
So, to summarise David Brooks position on the PSU swamp: it’s all the fault of a general lack of morality evidenced by 21st Century America, but if anyone objects to a specific moral lapse in 21st Century America, then they’re being vain.
Is that about right?
For Brooks to glibly lump in child molesters and Rwandan genocide is particularly offensive. Many who watched–or participated in genocide in that country were often given the choice of participating or being tortured and killed themselves by mobs. This was not a choice, I believe, or Mr. Paterno or Mr. McQueary were faced with. Brooks seems to judge other people’s choices, too, and from a more ignorant perspective.
the street beatings that happen in American neighborhoods?
Is Bobo really playing false equivalence with the old ooga-booga?
I understood him to mean the police actions at OWS sites.