Three cheers for David Brooks, who earlier this week used his column in The New York Times to speak up against the torrents of sanctimoniousness and self-righteousness that followed the revelations about child abuse at Penn State. “First came the atrocity, then came the vanity,” wrote Brooks. “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.”
Obviously many people do not intervene when they witness wrongdoing. The world we live in is constructed from planks made out of Cover Your Ass, Not in My Back Yard, To Get Along, Go Along, Scratch My Back And I’ll Scratch Yours, Be Smart and Keep Your Mouth Shut, all of which are assembled by spinmeisters of the first order into elaborate castles of deceit and evasion. The story of our current financial crisis is clotted with incidents when people did speak up about the impending disaster, only to discover that the men in whom they confided turned a blind eye. Merril Lynch’s risk officer told chairman Stanley O’Neal of the impending subprime crisis; O’Neal responded by ostracizing the risk manager; when he was finally ousted, he took a $161 million package with him. Citicorp’s chairman Chuck Prince was another one who could see the onrushing collapse, but he did nothing to halt it. “When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated,” he famously said, “but as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.”
It takes real courage to be the one who stops the dancing. Acknowledging this does not mitigate the fault of those who failed to pass on what they had learned about Sandusky. They must be held responsible. But no one who hasn’t had to face a moment of truth should be blithe about the ease of facing a power structure. It’s a hell of a thing to realize that morality requires us not only to behave virtuously at all times, but a willingness to lose everything of value in order to do the right thing. Whistleblower protection doesn’t exist in every field; on the contrary, messengers of bad news are frequently shot. I don’t think it’s been firmly established what Mike McQueary did or did not do, but imagine if someone in his position had gone to the police, with the result of Sandusky’s arrest, Paterno’s forced resignation, and Penn State being banned from bowl game appearances for a couple of years. Would McQueary be celebrated as a hero? It’s more likely his career at Penn State would have been ruined, and he could have packed his bags fortified with the potential thanks of people oblivious to having been saved.
It’s not an accident that the greatest success with reporting child abuse has been with people who are obligated by law to contact legal authorities. In many states, teachers, ministers, and physicians and other health professionals are required to report even their suspicions to the police. Such a rule takes courage out of the equation; in fact, it replaces it with self-preservation.
“Commentators ruthlessly vilify all involved from the island of their own innocence,” wrote David Brooks. “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.”
How do we teach our children to speak truth to power?