Recently, I’ve been pondering the Penn State situation, but in a very circumspect way. Obviously, it’s horrible. But beyond that point I’m not entirely sure what I think, so I’m going to use this space to try and develop my thoughts.
I want to preface all of this by stating clearly that I am absolutely not trying to provide an apology of any sort for any of the actors involved. I agree that there is no defense for their actions, and I agree that ‘I told my boss’ does not constitute anything like an acceptable response. And I want to further note that perhaps the biggest lesson here is the extent to which predatory behavior counts on people looking the other way, in the way that it marginalizes the humanity of those who are harmed.
But (and of course there is a but), I’m nevertheless worried about the form in which these concerns are expressed. To some, the facts in this case are so obvious and absolute that anyone expressing any doubt, or attempting to explain the motivations of those who enabled the wrong to continue, is castigated.
My position is: the moral wrong is clear, and good people do right to insist on this in a forthright manner. However, those who desperately WANT there to be some explanation or excuse or loophole are not moral monsters, even if in their desire for something to explain they may appear that way. The students at Penn State angry about the firing of Paterno are wrong, but they are wrong in a way that IS understandable. For them, the specific facts are caught up in a much larger mythos of who they are, what it means to be at Penn State, etc. For people that have idolized Paterno for decades it will be very difficult to pierce through their filters.
The point I want to make is that, while wrong, people who express those kind of feelings are contributing something important to the conversation.
To explain what I mean, let me make a slight digression.
Consider Rick Perry, who as governor of Texas was personally responsible for killing an innocent man – and who later impeded investigations that would have made this very clear. Or consider Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves. Andrew Jackson orchestrated genocide. FDR rounded up and interned Japanese Americans for no reason whatsoever. Present-day Americans consume massive amounts of energy and produce insane amounts of waste and pollution, which very likely contributes in serious ways to the deaths of countless people elsewhere in the world. We kill millions of sentient animals a day just to eat them, something I think future generations will regard with dismay and disgust. From the perspective of some people, millions of innocent children are killed in their mother’s womb every year. We wage war overseas in the name of democracy. And so on.
My point is not that all of these things are absolute moral evils in the same way that this Sandusky thing is. But maybe it is. Because my point is really that all of these things from at least some perspectives do rise to that threshold. They are more indirect, mostly, but not always. From the vantage point of 2011 it would be illegitimate to paint these things with precisely the same moral brush because they are obviously quite different in important ways. But from some other vantage point they might constitute absolute evils in the same way that we currently think of child rape.
And from that perspective, all the arguments that we would make to justify various behaviors in context would seem just as spurious.
But we are not moral monsters. We are simply ensconced within the morality of our own time and place. And it could not be otherwise.
I want to be clear at this point that I am not making a case for moral relativism, nor am I trying to minimize the legitimate outrage. We have all kinds of cultural, social, economic blinders that make it very easy for us to convince ourselves that the outrageous is merely the normal and that our responsibilities are small and limited. And we very much should strive against those tendencies.
However, and this is the thing that really makes me feel uncomfortable about the reactions, we need to remain empathetic, and not merely for the victims. By empathy I do NOT mean forgiveness, nor do I mean to provide an excuse or a defense. Empathy means attempting to grasp what makes it possible for people to behave in immoral ways. And most importantly, it means recognizing the bits of ourselves that manifest in the same way.
Basically, it’s all to easy to say ‘I would never have let that happen.’ And it may very well be true. But none of us can really know for sure. We all can get sucked into circumstances, lose track of a grander moral compass, fall off the right path.
The War Criminal Rises and Speaks – Okkervil River
When it comes to moral atrocity, and the sort of response I’m looking for, I can’t help but turn to Okkervil River.
There are three acts to this play:
The first focuses on the suburban reality of America: “The heart takes past Subway, past Stop and Shop, past Beal’s, and calls it ‘coming home.’” All is innocuous, and any violence or pain is far off in the distance, it cannot touch us or infect us. The music is quiet, his voice soft, but ever so slowly the tension builds…
The second part places us in the room with the war criminal as he tells his side: “Does the heart wants to atone? Oh, I believe that it’s so, because if I could climb back through time, I’d restore their lives and then give back my own.” All this time the tension is rising, the music begins to pound on the brain and Sheff’s voice crackles with intensity, it bends and breaks and shatters but still keeps on going. He makes no excuses, he cannot even cry, but it is clear that the mistake of 30 years ago has haunted him for every second of his life since. He does not ask to escape punishment, he only asks that those reading and watching to understand that he is not really any different from them, and for the hope that somehow he can be forgiven for falling into the abyss.
The music falls off the table and the quiet, doe-like Sheff is back in the third part. Here, they return to suburbia and deny any linkage between us and the war criminal: “Your heart’s warm and kind. Your mind is your own. Our blood-spattered criminal is inscrutable; don’t worry, he won’t rise up behind your eyes and take wild control. He’s not of this time, he fell out of a hole.” The message is optimistic but something is slightly different in his voice: there is a weariness, or perhaps a wariness: one can almost sense that he wants to believe this but cannot. Or is it simply a sneer? Sheff mockingly putting words in the mouths of those who fall back into easy condemnation: ‘I could never do something like that.’
The point is that people need to believe this about themselves. And it’s not necessarily a terrible thing. Perhaps society needs this kind of noble lie to keep being told in order to hold everything together.
But I want to believe that we are better than that. That our initial response, to attack the outrageous, is not the limit of our capacity to respond. That we can feel genuine empathy, a sense of the darkness in our own souls, at the edge of our own town. But that we can also have faith in our capacity to resist that darkness. That we must struggle, constantly, to hold back the war criminal within ourselves means that life is more than just an endless suburban landscape. And that seems far more optimistic than to simply condemn.
What does this all mean about Paterno, Penn State, and the like? Well, I think it means that people are absolutely right to make a very big deal of this. But I think that needs to include understanding that many of the villains of this story genuinely thought themselves to be good men put in a hard place, who managed to convince themselves that simply looking the other way was the right thing to do.
And in our rush to judgment, to absolute condemnation, we should be wary of falling into a the same kind of spiral ourselves, where what seems to be right becomes sufficient and definitive. We must indeed judge – I don’t want to deny that – but the distinction between judgment and outrage should not be entirely erased. Our outrage drives us, it manifests our moral character, it gives us life and energy. But it is not the entirety of our moral capacity.
Let this be a lesson in the horrible things that good people can do when faced with peculiar circumstances. And let it remind us that we ourselves may fall into the same trap. Hopefully never on anything remotely like the same scale. But we face tiny iterations of this problem every day.
If we want to say to ourselves ‘I would never have let that happen’ then we must do the hard work to make that statement true. Not just take it for granted that it is.