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.
Is Brooks a pedophile, also, too? It sure as hell seems like he’s saying it’s okay. Maybe the FBI ought to check his computers.
We haven’t lost our knowledge of what is right and wrong. We’ve lost — thanks to people like Brooks — the courage to stand up to authority, because people in authority always seem to be able to circle the wagons with impunity.
Predictable boilerplate conservative mish-mash from Brooks. In their minds things have been going to hell in a hand-basket ever since the freaking hippies made us end the Vietnam War, the lunatic liberals loosed all the darkies on the peaceable white people, the unions forced companies to pay fair wages to workers and women were allowed out from under the thumb of their male masters.
Their complete dissonance allows them to apply any blame, no matter how ridiculous and disconnected from facts and reality, straight at the feet of “liberals”.
The guy is incapable of an original thought.
As a person who tilts libertarian, I’ve been confused by David Brook’s thinking for some time.
I am also deeply disappointed with those who insist on seeing issues like this through a political prism. I mean, really?
Arendt, Milgram, and the Kitty Genovese murder (remember the bystander effect?) all have at least some bearing on how socially conditioned and probably naturally inclined humans are to look for signals from others and especially hierarchies for direction.
In my experience through the years in discovering fraud and meeting other fairly large decision points in organizations, I find it quite common that otherwise stable folks lose their ability to act on significant observations. Most witnesses and confessors actually require a physical helping hand to the applicable authorities or whoever is required to rectify the situation, even when they know the right thing to do.
This sort of hapless helplessness occurs regardless of where in the hierarchy people are; from the temp worker to the executive.
I am not making excuses for the guy who witnessed the terrible events in the shower. Personally, I find it is easier to look in the mirror and know that in other situations of grave concern, I have acted, sometimes violently, to stop whatever is occurring.
But as Milgram readily demonstrated, it is not the case that we all do so. And I am not sure I have the moral arrogance to judge everyone about it.
It is a strange and mystifying but quite common reaction, and certainly it is not totally explained by a Penn St. cover-up. If any cultural (not political) lesson can be learned, I humbly offer that I have long been concerned that we view 25 years of a very passive emotional and rational approach to education and development as our most effective method. I can not believe it is the best approach if confident, actualized and engaged adults is the goal. That is probably a totally inept explanation, and I am sure it is too simplistic. Still, there it is. The last thing we need is robots. But we sure like to treat people that way.
Milgram’s results outlined in Obedience To Authority should lay to rest any assumptions that people might make regarding how they would respond in situations such as these. Most of us fail to recognize the almost unconscious deference and respect that we will accord those in positions of authority. Whether it is an evolutionary response or simply a learned human reaction developed over centuries of cultural influence, we will almost always be swayed, often against our own better judgment and intuition, to respect the established hierarchies which surround us.
So I think that many among us who have been so quick to pass judgment fail to understand or appreciate how overpowering these external influences can be. Humans are a strangely evolved lot, who often will do things which defy common sense and for which they are often at a loss to supply a reasonable explanation for the most irrational of behaviors. This, of course, is no excuse for anyone to ignore heinous acts. But I think those who do not recognize that this quirk exists in all of us, to varying degrees, is being naive and presumptuous.
Ppl extrapolate too much from Milgram. I don’t see his study pertinent to this situation. It was 2 adults and a kid and an essentially life and death situation for the kid in that kidz lives are in many – and I’d say most- instances ruined by sexual abuse. Same with Kitty Genovese, not pertinent – ppl heard her but didn’t see her, it was dark, they were indoors, she was outdoors. They didn’t know the attacker and see him face to face.
As far as what I’d do. I don’t know. I’ve confronted abusers on the street, but I think the shock of what I was seeing would affect me. certainly discuss it with several people and eventually report it.
I posed this question at work today. “If you walked into a shower and saw a grown man buggering a kid, wouldn’t you at least yell,’Hey! What are you doing to that kid!’?” From all over the political spectrum, including the Teabaggers, the response ranged from “Hell Yes!” to “I’d beat the crap out of him!”. Teabaggers tended toward “I’d beat the crap out of him!” And that’s blue-collar America heard from. Nobody, but nobody would slink away to report it without attempting intervention. As for myself, I would certainly yell and try to get him to stop. If he was bigger than than me and turned violent, I’d run like Hell, but at least I’d try to get him to stop.
That has been the mystery to me in this whole scandal as well. Perhaps I don’t quite understand the emotional dynamics of what was going on at Penn State. I guess I can kind of understand that if a person saw an authority figure they respected raping a child, they might be so shocked as to be unable to intervene in that moment. But only for a few minutes.
Maybe it’s one of those things that you can only know how you would react if it really happened. Like, most of us think we would act heroically in a mugging situation, but in the end 99% of people hand over the wallet with no resistance (which is also always the wise thing to do, btw.)
But in a child rape situation, I’m pretty confident that I would also try to stop the guy and/or immediately call the cops. And frankly I have faith that most other people would as well. That’s why I don’t quite understand this Penn State thing. The people involved seem to be deeply morally corrupt to an abnormal degree. That whole program is clearly f***ed up in a lot of ways. But I don’t know what it is about the particular incentives in college football that caused it to become that way.
The Catholic church scandal on the other hand makes somewhat more sense, as people have all sorts of conflicting beliefs and deep-seated emotions tied up with the priesthood.
No one has questioned how Sandusky might have treated graduate assistants. There are a lot of possible scenarios in that question that could cause the same conflict as arises with priests.
And then there is the matter that sports for some in the US are a cult activity.
That’s true, although I have trouble seeing how a college football coach rises to the same level of authority as a Catholic priests. Maybe these guys Paterno and Sandusky are different because they were so successful in their profession. Local legends and all that.
Really? Do you not follow college football or college basketball at all?
Or, for that matter, sports in general. I’d say it’s fairly common for coaches to have more authority in the lives of their players, and in the lives of their community, than many, if not most, Catholic priests (or ministers, or other religious leaders).
An adult is another story. You might hesitate, wondering if it is consensual even if the victim is screaming. It could be a kinky sex game. But an obvious kid?
It’s the same old “lost our moral compass in the 1960s” horseshit that Republicans have been peddling since Nixon.
From the same folks that didn’t find torture to be wrong for the US to do.
Why does the blogosphere continue to waste time deconstructing David Brooks’s palaver?
Is he saying that in order to know buggering a 10-year-old in the shower is evil, one first has to recognize that, deep down, we all want to bugger 10-year-olds in the shower?
Maybe that call to the FBI would be a good idea.
No, you folks are wrong in one way. For Brooks and the other lunatic rightwing assholes, gay sex and pedophilia are equivalent. Thus, by legitimizing gay sex, we are legitimizing pedophilia. It’s a disgusting equating which is false and wrong, but is very common on the right. Thus, to Brooks, the two are equivalent. He has lost his moral bearings in that way.
You know it.
To many right wingers, gay people are pedophiles. But exactly the opposite is true. Openly gay men would NEVER molest a child. In almost all cases of pedophilia, it is straight men exercising power over children to prove something to themselves about themselves.
South Park (Episode: Cripple Fight) showed this really well in an episode about Big Gay Al as a Boy Scout leader. The kids all loved him and he cared so much about the kids. But some parents were worried that the homo might molest their kids and they couldn’t trust him. So they got a big buff straight guy (who they trusted implicitly) to replace him and that guy proceeded to take naked pictures of and mess with the boys. The parents didn’t even believe their kids when they told them about it.
Yes! Back in eighth grade there was a shop teacher who was molesting one kid. When we reported it we got,”What a nasty boy to say such wicked lies about that nice Mr. Jones.” It may have even started my distrust of authorities.
I suspect your story has a lot of relevance for the PennSt scandal.
Grad students are nearly powerless when confronting an “authority figure” (as Sandusky was, at the time). Confrontation, or even reporting to cops, could easily be turned against the student.
Brooks is an idiot asshole. Oh yeah, years ago there was a moral compass…one that was A-OK with priests buggering kids, right Brooksie? I guess that’s the kind of world Brooks wants to return to, where authority figures could corn-hole kids with impunity.
The priest-buggering-kids phenom is so well established in the Catholic tradition that they even have a term (catamite) for the youth so involved. That’s kinda staggering to comprehend.
The term “catamite” is not confined to the priesthood. It is a long-established term.
Y’all don’t understand. Brooks hearkens back to and yearns for an earlier, more time-tested script: “If it feels all right for you, and you’re a straight white male, it’s probably OK.”
Several years ago I was out with a bunch of Northern Minnesotan guys at a cabin in the woods around a campfire, drinking heavily. Somehow one of them mentioned his Boy Scout leader molesting him as a child. Most of the crowd sympathized and admitted that their Boy Scout leader did the same to them. It was almost like a rite of passage. Bizarre, I thought.
But if any of them today learned (or witnessed) a person of authority buggering a young child, you could bet your ass that every last one of these guys would, at minimum, yell at the molester and most likely beat the living shit out of him.
This McQueary guy who witnessed the ass-raping of a 10 year old in the shower seemed to be far too interested in his future career prospects to stand up for what was right. He freaked out and chose to put it out of his mind. Perhaps he didn’t realize the potential blackmail value in what he just witnessed that would have ensured him a good future with the team. But he did nothing for that kid.
I don’t know. It really pisses me off.
I’d like to ask Brooks what he would do if he saw a child/minor being molested or sexually abused? Then he could assure us that his moral bearings have been perfectly atuned for his entire life and will be until the end of his time, in spite of his gratuitous and stupid remark about the evil in ‘yourself’ (he could have at least said ‘in you and me’, then the conversation could have really taken off). And that moral norms don’t need to be supported and enforced by laws and courts is stupid treachery. Here he panders to the ‘adtivist judges crowd’. Or does he really believe all of this? Or he’s lying, at least deviously misleading. Take your pick. I’ll go for the second choice and never again waste any time on him. More important, is the hysteria at Penn Sate also proof that everything is going downhill in Brooks’s estimatation? In the long run the demonstrative sense of frustration and betrayal at a major US university is more significant as a social guage of emotional maturity and ability to cope with inevitable ‘evil’ met in life than any individual nasty crime against a child, however repulsive.
Ever since Lee Atwater got Bush the Elder to campaign as Archie Bunker and say atheists aren’t citizens the Republican Party has known it can win only by being the party of stupid religious bigots and whining that socialist, secularist liberals are neither real Christians nor real Americans.
And, just as it was when Bush 41 did it, it’s always a bit jarring when somebody we know is far from being truly such a stupid bigot, personally, starts playing that role.
When George Will, for example, reputedly an agnostic, starts droning on that we’ve lost our moral compass because we’ve drifed away from our Christian roots it makes me want to put a pie in his face.
Oh, but the hippie slogan “if it feels good, do it” that he and the Christian right love to target when claiming to attack secularism, liberalism, and “permissiveness” was and is pretty stupid, too.
david brooks is such a fucking asshole. if i was HIS kid, you can bet he’d be making a federal case out of it.
There a certain irony in your choice of insult.
I think David Brooks knows that he wouldn’t do a damn thing if he saw his boss buggering a child, and he wants to be absolved of his guilt over that fact by projecting his moral weakness on the rest of us.
For some small population, perhaps he has a point. There is definitely a leadership gap on morality (which obviously doesn’t mean we ALL just lose the ability to do right, like Brooks suggests). If you are the type who idolizes leaders, and your leader shows you how (not) to deal with molestation..
What exactly is the difference?
I do not have “bystander syndrome”. To the contrary, a number of times in my life I have intervened in situations that directly endangered my life. It was a mindless reflex. Obviously, I’m a mutant with excessive altruism and Brooks is an idiot with no moral values. Types like him are more lively to survive than types like me and that contributes to my despair over the future of the human race.
I cannot comprehend seeing someone buggering a child and doing nothing to immediately stop it. This does not compute. I don’t care how big or powerful the molester is, I would start screaming bloody murder and try to scratch out his eyes. This whole story disturbs me deeply. Are they ALL pedophiles, overt or latent? I cannot conceive of any other logical explanation for the chain of events.
It really depends on exactly what was going on. As such, it’s hard to say. If you saw the full act of penetration of an adult on a child, that is one thing – clear and unmistakeable. If you saw the adult drying off the child with a towel, you might think it was his father or grandfather. Not all observed acts are so obvious and clear as to IMMEDIATELY compel an action. Even a flagrant and out-of-control pedophile would probably try to conceal the act of full penetration.
Again with our stupid scribes flogging the “bystander effect”, which is more like the “Harlan Ellison lying his Upper East Side snob ass off but no one will call him on it because it’s just so wrong to criticize an Upper East Side snob effect”.
teehee. Be careful saying anything remotely derogatory about Harlan Ellison. He might sue ya’. 😉
I expect brooks will next write about McQueary’s “enlightened self-interest” in realizing that knowledge of Sandusky’s rape of a 10 year old might be parlayed into a full time coaching position. Intervening to halt an injustice without regard to one’s personal fate and fortune sounds suspiciously liberal.
It is liberal (and progressive), but ppl like Brooks don’t recognize it and keep searching for the ulterior motive or payoff.
Yes, that is some seriously stupid shit to be sayIng on tv. More stupid Thant a lot of other conservative talk by numbers shit? Not so much.