Writing for the Mockingbird Blog, Todd Brewer quotes David Brooks:
First came the atrocity, then came the vanity. 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…His conclusion:
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.Read the rest.
3 comments:
I think he is quoting David Brooks's article in the NY Times today in that section.
Ah... Thanks
I get the point of Brooks' article, but it seems a false dichotomy. I will take the atrocity-vanity any day over atrocity-atrocity.
It's no news flash that humans without sin categories are prone to overlook egregious sins. But at least we know after the fact when someone has screwed up. Can you imagine a world where we overlook sin after the fact too? What McQueary did was undeniably cowardly and sinful. What those who judge him now might or might not have done doesn't change that.
And by the way, I really have to wonder if Brooks is actually right that most of us would turn tail and run after seeing what McQueary saw. Brooks' pessimism on humanity seems, if it's possible, too strong.
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