Bobo’s Moral Relativism
By 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.