David Brooks appeared on Meet the Press this morning with E.J. Dionne, and they discussed the situation at Penn State. David Brooks had an interesting perspective. Here’s what he said about a situation where you walk in on a middle-aged man buggering a ten-year old in a locker room shower:
MR. BROOKS: I don’t think it was just a Penn State problem. You know, you spend 30 or 40 years muddying the moral waters here. We have lost our clear sense of what evil is, what sin is; and so, when people see things like that, they don’t have categories to put it into. They vaguely know it’s wrong, but they’ve been raised in a morality that says, “If it feels all right for you, it’s probably OK.” And so that waters everything down. The second thing is a lot of the judgment is based on the supposition that if we were there, we would have intervened.
MR. DIONNE: Right.
MR. BROOKS: And that’s just not true.
MR. GREGORY: But I have to challenge you on that point.
MR. DIONNE: Yeah.
Mr. Dionne was not agreeing with David Brooks, as the next part makes clear.
MR. GREGORY: Is it really that we don’t know right from wrong? Is there anybody who doesn’t know that sodomizing a 10-year-old boy in a shower by another man is wrong?
MR. BROOKS: But if you…
MR. DIONNE: Exactly.
Let’s look at Brooks’s argument so far, because he’s made two distinct points. The first point is that when we see a grown man buggering a young child we are programmed to think to ourselves, “Well, if it feels all right for you, it’s probably OK.” And then, you know, we go get lunch.
So, that’s point one. Point two is that no one, literally no one, would intervene to put an immediate stop to such an assault. This point seems very important to him.
MR. BROOKS: If you’re alert to the sense of what evil is, what the evil is within yourself and what evil is in society, you have a script to follow. It’s not a vague sense. You have a script to follow. And this is necessary because people do not intervene. If–there’s been a ton of research on this. They say people, they ask people, “If you saw something cruel, if you saw racism and sexism, will you intervene?” Then they hire actors, and they put it right in front of them. People do not intervene. It’s called the bystander effect. It happens again and again, people don’t intervene. That’s why we need these scripts to remind people how, how evil can be all around.
Now, let’s review. Absolutely no one intervenes to stop statutory rape and forcible sodomy of young boys anymore because we’ve lost any sense that such activities are evil. We knew they were evil 30 or 40 years ago, before people muddied the waters with all this out-of-wedlock sexytime behavior. But now pretty much everyone thinks child rape can’t be all bad if the rapist derives some pleasure from it. We could fix this though, if we would just memorize some scripts about what is good and what is evil.
Is it me, or is this some powerfully stupid shit to be saying on national television?
And, again, when asked whether we should have stronger reporting requirements so people might feel compelled to report child rape rather than musing about its place on the pleasure index, David Brooks basically took a pass.
MR. BROOKS: Well, I think they obviously need to make the law more robust. But we can’t rely on law and rules. It’s up to personal discretion. We’ve taken a lot of moral decisions and tried to make them all legal based. But there has to be a sense of personal responsibility, regardless of what the rules are, “Here’s what you do to stop it.” And so if you try to make everything a matter of legalism and rules, you’re going to get people doing the minimal, and you’re going, going to have people thinking, “It’s not my responsibility. It’s, it’s somehow lodged in the rules.”
You know what happens when you try to let the religious authorities protect our children from sexual predators instead of having strong and unforgiving law enforcement?
Yeah, I think you know how that’s worked out both recently, and throughout recorded history. They give us one script, and they follow another one.
Hopefully I do not have to explain the silliness of believing that children were better protected 30 or 40 years ago. Pretty much everyone is better protected in our contemporary society than they were 30-40 years ago. The only exception is probably employment security, but that’s different than discrimination and rape and hate crimes. Fifty years ago we still had an apartheid state in the South. Until about ten seconds ago, gays couldn’t serve openly in the military. I think we’re making progress just fine without taking back up all the old tired scripts that dance in David Brooks’s addled memory.