Not content to be mocked for his Meet the Press performance, David Brooks doubled-down and wrote his Sunday column on the same subject. It appears that Mr. Brooks is deeply agitated by the people’s reaction to the child-rape scandal at Penn State. His biggest concern is that people are passing judgment on the officials who did little or nothing to put a stop to child-rape. As far as Brooks is concerned, most of us wouldn’t have done anything either and so we’re either hypocrites or just sanctimonious blowhards.
His secondary concern is that we’re all missing the obvious lesson from Penn State, which is that we have given up religion and no longer have any moral compass.
As Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel write in their book, “Blind Spots,” “When it comes time to make a decision, our thoughts are dominated by thoughts of how we want to behave; thoughts of how we should behave disappear.”
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.
But we’re not Puritans anymore. We live in a society oriented around our inner wonderfulness. So when something atrocious happens, people look for some artificial, outside force that must have caused it — like the culture of college football, or some other favorite bogey. People look for laws that can be changed so it never happens again.
Commentators ruthlessly vilify all involved from the island of their own innocence. Everyone gets to proudly ask: “How could they have let this happen?”
The proper question is: How can we ourselves overcome our natural tendency to evade and self-deceive. That was the proper question after Abu Ghraib, Madoff, the Wall Street follies and a thousand other scandals. But it’s a question this society has a hard time asking because the most seductive evasion is the one that leads us to deny the underside of our own nature.
Any argument that begins with “in centuries past” is already suspect, but let’s take Brooks seriously for just a moment. He’s basically saying that we used to be much more aware of our own sinfulness than we are today. And he’s saying that this change is a bad thing and that it helps explain why Bernie Madoff was allowed to run a Ponzi scheme, why Rumsfeld was allowed to run a massive torture chamber, and why bankers were allowed to create mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps. For Brooks, these crimes and practices were not the result of weak laws and/or weak enforcement of the laws. These crimes and practices resulted because ordinary people forgot that they, too, are horrible sinners and, therefore, they didn’t do anything to stop the people they saw sinning.
It’s actually difficult for me to follow this logic. Let’s start with something that ought to be uncontroversial. In centuries past we had the Holocaust, and war between states was almost routine. In centuries past we had no human rights infrastructure or international norms for protecting the innocent. In centuries past we bought and sold human beings like livestock. In centuries past, we put children in the mines and on the assembly lines. In centuries past, women were treated as property and had no right to divorce or even to vote. In short, it’s pretty close to impossible to argue that people were more moral in the past than they are today. Many of the things we find abhorrent today were not even against the law in the recent past. For one topical example of how we’ve made some moral improvement, note how people basically shrugged when Roman Polanski drugged and sodomized a 13 year-old girl in 1977, and compare that to how people have reacted to Jerry Sandusky’s similar actions against boys. It’s pretty clear that people are less forgiving of child rape today than they were thirty-four years ago. Is that moral progress or are we just pretending to be simon-pure?
That’s the way that Brooks’s argument comes off for me. He appears to be making the argument that we’re looking at the speck of sawdust in Sandusky, McQueary, and Paterno’s eyes and paying no attention to the plank in own own. Who are we to pass judgment on these people?
Believe me, I have also been a bit repelled by some of the sanctimony I’ve seen from people who act so certain that they would have done better in McQueary or Paterno’s place. Some of us wouldn’t have done better. I don’t disagree with that. But why is Brooks so upset?
He’s upset because we think too highly of ourselves (and our “inner wonderfulness”) and appear to be unaware of our awful, sinful nature. And, despite all the evidence of history, he thinks we were more moral in centuries past than we are today.
In his Meet the Press appearance he made this really clear when he said this about how we would react to seeing a middle-aged man sodomizing a 10 year-old:
“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.”
I don’t know anybody, and I mean anybody, who would react to such a scene by thinking it’s “probably okay.” And I don’t like to do armchair psychology, but for Brooks to even make such a statement indicates to me that there is some serious inner turmoil that this scandal has summoned up. If he were to argue that we should act less shocked and more humble, I might have some sympathy for his argument. But he’s arguing that we’re wrong to be so outraged and, on some level, that we’re responsible for all the things that are going wrong in the world because we think too highly of ourselves.
I think he needs to talk to a therapist.
