( – promoted by Sue Prent)
(Pardon the lack of direct Vermont content here. But this drove me up a wall, and the best way to climb down is to write about it. Otherwise, I’ll grind my teeth to a fine powder while I sleep tonight.)
David Brooks, putative moderate conservative and Junior Wise Man of the New York Times op-ed pages, comes in for a lot of scorn on the left. I don’t always share that view; I often enjoy his weekly appearances with E.J. Dionne on NPR. They frequently manage to transcend the usual he-said/he-said of “balanced” punditry, and actually present some original thought.
However, this weekend Brooks said something I just couldn’t let pass.
He was on “Meet the Press” with Dionne, commenting on the week’s news. And, of course, the Penn State scandal came up. One key point of the scandal is that, in 2002, a graduate assistant at Penn State witnessed former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky committing a sex act on a young boy in the football program’s showers. Somehow, this didn’t result in Sandusky’s arrest — or even banishment from the premises. He continued to be closely associated with Penn State football for nine years.
Okay, back to Brooks. In his appearance on “Meet the Press,” he invoked one of the tiredest tropes of modern conservatism — that America’s moral and ethical decay is a product of the Sixties, when those dirty hippies undermined traditional values.*
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 okay.” … 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.
See, we used to know what sin was. We used to have “scripts” that told us right from wrong. But then the Sixties happened, and all that was good about America was irrevocably tarnished. Ever since, we have been “raised in a morality that says ‘If it feels all right for you, it’s probably okay.'” Which is a really clumsy rephrasing of the Sixties’ “If it feels good, do it.” Damn hippies! If it wasn’t for them, that graduate assistant would have had an infallible moral compass that would have automatically informed him that, yes, child rape is wrong.
Here’s the thing, Bobo. You’ve got it exactly backwards. It’s the guys with the scripts who have been diddling America’s children. It’s the Catholic priests and bishops, who lead the world in peddling prefab moral scripts. It’s the most tradition-bound of football programs, Penn State, led by the famously old-school Joe Paterno.
“Scripts” do not, in fact, ensure standards of morality. Rather, they breed inertia and self-satisfaction. If you have a script and rely on it, you’re likely to see the world through the prism of that script (pardon mixed metaphor). And you’re more likely to reject new, incongruent information — e.g. that one of your script’s authority figures is raping a child in the shower.
The hippies didn’t make Jerry Sandusky into a pedophile, and they didn’t make the good men of Penn State Football into enablers of pedophilia. But David Brooks would rather blame the Sixties than face up to an unnerving reality: that our society’s heroes and leaders are as fallible as any of us. And perhaps even more so.
*Actually, our moral and ethical decay is the product, not of the Sixties, but of American capitalism co-opting and corrupting the values of the Sixties: “Do your own thing” transmuted into a consumerist call to unabashed self-interest. But that’s another story.
in which the left has allowed the right to “brand” the moral high-ground, despite the fact that their marching orders are selfish, mean-spririted to the point of cruelty, and focussed on exclusion rather than inclusion.
This has never made any sense to me, and it drives me crazy that the Democrats have not taken more of a stand on the simple morality and patriotism inherent in the progressive position.
Only a “conservative” would be craven enough to imagine the kind of rationalization projected by Brooks’ comment.
in old time ’60’s terms. It’s the establishment and institutions that failed.
The suggestion that the pre-60s crowd had a better moral compass is laughable. Try telling that to people of color, women, and gays & lesbians. Or how about the vicious treatment of those who challenged U.S. foreign policy?
I wonder if David Brooks would have seen the evil in Senator Joe McCarthy. And did he see the evil in Dick Cheney?
I wish I’d lived in the age when there were no rapes, no incest, no taxes…
unless of the course “moral decay” hypothesis extends to the Church’s even wider abuses. I wish Brooks luck pushing that among his conservative friends.
The specious “moral decay” argument is the typical rhetoric against higher education. Unfortunately, Penn State doesn’t come across as a bastion of liberalism nor intelligence. It’s sort of a football school. And if this was a problem with the 60s “new left” it fails the cause-and-effect test and in the arithmetic since Coach Paterno came from a previous generation.
In fact, conservatives are more likely to sexually offend than liberals, and members of ultra-conservative religious groups most of all. Here’s the key quotation from a former priest turned science writer:
“More than 100 reports in the scientific and professional literature, involving more than 35,000 subjects, indicate that rapists, child molesters, incestuous parents, and sexually motivated murderers are typically very conservative in their sexual and social values and sometimes more religious than average-suggesting that in many cases traditional sexual morality is a contributing factor in sexual abuse rather than a deterrent. At the First International Conference on the Treatment of Sex Offenders in 1989, there was broad agreement that Western societies with repressive sexual attitudes and traditional male/female roles are more likely to have high rates of all forms of sex crimes.”
I wrote a piece on this that piles on the evidence: http://www.minorheresies.com/p…
My summary is that if you have a problem with sexuality you probably have a sexual problem.