In the second act of the drama, Penn State's legendary football coach, Joe Paterno, as well as the university president, were both fired. The trustees felt they had not done enough to push the investigation of the retired coach, Jerry Sandusky. In 2002 they were given specific and credible allegations that Sandusky had been caught having sex with a minor on campus. They called him in and told Sandusky that he was not to bring any more children onto the campus. That was it. No police investigation, no attempt to identify the minor.
The third act of the drama has just begun. Lawyers have been parachuting into Pennsylvania, ringing doorbells in the search for more victims. The taxpayers of Pennsylvania are going to be on the hook for a big settlement by the time this is all through.
One of the more inexplicable aspects of the story was that not once, but twice, individuals walked in on a middle aged man clearly having sex with a young boy. In both cases, they did nothing to intervene, but merely turned around and walked out.
In watercooler conversations about this situation, the conventional wisdom is "I would have done something. I would have gone in there and torn that guy off the kid." I'm guessing that most of us would do no such thing. Why do we think we would behave in a more heroically active fashion than the 28 year old grad student who walked in on Sandusky and his victim in 2002.
History is full of examples of people not taking an active stand on behalf of their morals. In 1964 Kitty Genovese was knifed to death on a public street. At least a dozen people heard her cries for help, and no one intervened. In the sixties, sociologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of studies where subjects administered what they thought were serious electrical shocks to others, solely because a man in a lab coat told them to. Recently, in China, a small child was struck by a car on a busy street. A number of people passed by in vehicles and on foot without stopping to help.
We all like to think we would act to help others, step in to right a wrong, even if there was some risk to ourselves. Sadly, the evidence indicates otherwise.
2 comments:
Be careful when mentioning Kitty Genovese. While the "Bystander Effect" has been verified by extensive research, the murder of Kitty Genovese did not happen the way that it was reported by the New York Times.
http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk/archive/archive_home.cfm?volumeID=21&editionID=164&ArticleID=1394
http://www.psych.lancs.ac.uk/people/uploads/MarkLevine20070604T095238.pdf
http://www.onthemedia.org/2009/mar/27/the-witnesses-that-didnt/transcript/
Or you can read Chapter 3, Unbelievable Stories of Apathy and Altruism, in .
You are stating as facts hearsay and allegations unproven in a court of law. Until these facts are credibly established beyond a reasonable doubt in a judicial proceeding you do not know what happened in this case. A few short years ago everyone from the New York Times to the guy at the watercooler knew that members of the Duke lacrosse team had gang raped a poor, black single mother at a debauched party. Duke threw the students out, fired the coach, and disbanded the team. The judicial process eventually discovered that there was not even a shred of truth to the story, and that the DA had known that when he went to the grand jury with his tale. The DA went to prison for judicial oppression and Duke paid millions to settle lawsuits from students and coaches. I am astonished at the collective amnesia in the media about an incident with close parallels to the Penn State case. But then the media didn't look so good in the Duke affair, did it? The rush to judgment at Penn State reflects both a shocking inability to learn from the Duke case and a repellant disregard for the presumption of an accused's innocence enshrined in our common law traditions.
The Genovese case, the Milgram experiments, or you might have added the civilian population of Nazi Germany, are not evidence of the depravity or indifference of human beings. Rather they demonstrate what we do when confused about the meaning of a social act--in particular an act or incident we have never seen before. In these cases we look to the people around us to give us interpretive cues to the meaning of what we have witnessed. If they are similarly confused or uncertain then you can have what is in retrospect deficient group cognition. I'm not saying people are not in fact depraved or indifferent; they may be. But the cases you cited are instances of an epistemological problem, not an ethical one.
So Penn State: what would I do? Having never in my life seen what you have described in your blog, I would probably wonder if I could possibly have seen what I thought I saw, and would have gone to my boss to try to figure it out.
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