The Penn State Child Sex Abuse Scandal & the Desperation of David Brooks
Brooks claims, without any evidence to justify his hyperbole, that "a zillion commentators" have engaged in "vanity" because they are outraged about the alleged child rape, serial sex abuse and cover-up at Penn State. He claimed, again with no specifics, that this mass "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," Brooks continued, "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." Its certainly true that people often turn a blind eye to atrocities large and small. And Brooks goes on to cite social science research that seeks to explain such phenomena. But he uses these findings to broad-brush all media outrage about the Penn State scandal as therefore inherently "naive." But really now. Is Brooks actually outraged because media commentators are outraged? Me thinks he doth protest too much. There is something else going on here that I think throws open a window onto what Brooks does not want us to see: How society has responded to the child sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church is a far more relevant analogy to the Penn State situation than the world's inaction in response to the genocide in Rwanda. The widespread sex abuse and child rape by Catholic priests and the cover-ups by the hierarchy is one of the great moral scandals in the Western world in recent decades. One consequence is that this situation has made it difficult for the Catholic neo-conservatives who have politically aligned themselves with the Religious Right to wield the moral authority of a Church engulfed in an historic meltdown from which it may never recover. (Even if the Church somehow manages to regain its footing on economic justice, it may already be too late.) The emphasis on authority, obedience, and orthodoxy emphasized by the Catholic Right and neo-conservatism as the foundation of society is undermined when the moral authority of foundational institutions are so seriously undermined that few are able to take them seriously. Even Brooks' diversionary army of strawmen cannot decouple the child sex abuse scandals at Penn State and in the Catholic Church. People generally, even Brooks' most loyal readers can see that the real issue remains the permission these institutions and their leaders gave themselves to tolerate heinous crimes. That being so, Brooks not only attempts to divert our attention from the crimes, the criminals, and the institutions that gave them succor. He tries to shift the blame, and in so doing waxes nostalgic for moral systems of centuries past including -- I kid you not -- the Puritans!
In centuries past, people built moral systems that acknowledged this weakness. 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. They helped people make moral judgments and hold people responsible amidst our frailties. And there you have it. The real problem is the hippies who have led us all to think that some "outside force... like the culture of college football or some other favorite bogey" is to blame, and not our inner darkness, the inevitability of our fallen nature that needs to be restrained by ancient moral codes and institutions that know better than the rest of us ( certainly better than the hippies on TV.) Therefore, according to Brooks, those of us who look to change the laws so that they are less likely to be evaded and more likely to be enforced against child rapists and their enablers are "naive" and indulging our "inner wonderfulness." This is a dimension of the so-called culture war that merits more and not less attention. The conservative, authoritarian culture of elements of the Catholic Church and of college sports stands exposed as so protective of their own power and prerogatives, that that they will tolerate and protect one of their own against accountability for sex crimes against children whose care has been entrusted to them. There is hardly a better expression of illegitimate power and authority than the ability of certain elites to hold themselves above and exempt from the moral standards and the laws that apply to the rest of us.
The Penn State Child Sex Abuse Scandal & the Desperation of David Brooks | 7 comments (7 topical, 0 hidden)
The Penn State Child Sex Abuse Scandal & the Desperation of David Brooks | 7 comments (7 topical, 0 hidden)
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